More Archweb Work

Because it is what I’ve been spending most of my Arch free time on lately, I thought I’d make another quick post on what’s happening with the Arch Linux website.

• Filelists are back! Check out a package page such as pacman. You’ll see the Files header at the bottom; if you click the link inside you’ll get a filelist. If you aren’t crazy and using something like noscript, some nice AJAX will put the list right inside the page; otherwise you’ll be sent off to the files page.
• Mirror management improvements. We manage all our (known) mirrors through a developer accessible UI, and we were missing some important fields to store things like what tier a mirror is or what rsync credentials it should be using. These are now available.
• reporead improvements. This script is the magic that takes a pacman database and shoves it into our web site database to get all the relevant information out there. It is a bit more robust and now allows for force updates if/when new fields are added.
• Speaking of new fields, you can now see the compressed size, installed size, and the build date of every package on the website.
• Courtesy of Evangelos Foutras, the developer todo list UI now has some AJAX to make package flagging slightly less painful.
• Many small touchups for efficiency, such as not fetching the full list of packages whenever a user clicks through on the Recent Updates box.
• Recent updates groups together multiple architectures in order to make more packages visible in the box.
• Feeds for package updates are a lot more granular. Check out the new feeds page for more details.

A few more things are planned down the road. These include:

• Advanced search. This will allow searching on every field we have in the database as well as finding a package with a given filename (or filename prefix).
• Remove some of the lesser used pieces of the site in favor of linking to important wiki articles. These include Arch-based Projects, Press (which has been unlinked for a long time), International Communities, and IRC Channels. Putting this stuff on the wiki will allow it to be kept much more up to date than it currently is.
• Other general cleanup. We have old CSS styles, hacks from the pre-1.0 Django days, and a lot of style embedded in our templates rather than in stylesheets.
• And of course, any contributions from you that will enhance the site for the whole Arch community. :)

See Also

• Recent Archweb Improvements - August 27, 2010
• Archweb DB Schema - June 3, 2010
• Archweb gets a refresher - January 31, 2010
• Arch Package Visualization - June 23, 2011
• python-pgpdump, a PGP packet parser library - March 8, 2012