Recent Archweb Improvements

I’ve wrote about improvements to archweb, the Arch Linux main website code, a few times in the past. I thought I’d do another quick post since I just did a bit of a development sprint of my own on the code in order to do a few things with Django I hadn’t done before and to implement some nice new features.

• Package groups support. Package groups not only show up on individual packages such as the gcc details page, but now have both an overview page and individual group pages such as base-devel for x86_64.
• Public developer todo list access. These were formerly tucked away in the developer-only side of the site, but now they are exposed for all to view. My good friend and former Archweb maintainer Dusty started the work on this, and I touched it up today to make the page show a lot more detail on the items.
• Package Differences by Architecture page. This has finally been implemented in the main website. For a long time, the differences page on archlinux.de was the only place to see this information. While not quite as full-featured as that page just yet, this is a good base that can easily be improved to strip out packages in [multilib], screen out minor versions (such as 1.1), etc.
• Client side table sorting using JS. Unfortunately the majority of the tables included by this change were on the developer side of the site, but many of the tables on the site are now completely sortable. The above mentioned todo list page is included as is the package differences page. The “largest” table in the site, package search results, does not have client-side sorting due to the pagination but it has always had clickable headers so this shouldn’t be too big of a drawback.

There were many other small changes as well in the past few weeks:

• Maintainers are now shown by full name in the package search and inactive developers are excluded.
• Cleaned up the backend logic for generating SVN and bug tracker links to our various packages.
• Packages marked out of date with an update in [testing] will have text stating such fact.
• The last packager of a package is now included in the web interface (not just the maintainer).
• The mark out of date feature now stores the date a package was flagged; this is yet to be utilized but could easily be exposed in the future.

Enjoy the best distro website out there!

See Also

• Archweb DB Schema - June 3, 2010
• More Archweb Work - March 10, 2010
• Archweb gets a refresher - January 31, 2010
• Arch Package Visualization - June 23, 2011
• python-pgpdump, a PGP packet parser library - March 8, 2012