How to best reach the users of a package?

Stefano Zacchiroli zack at debian.org
Sun Aug 6 09:33:06 UTC 2006


On Sat, Aug 05, 2006 at 08:20:55PM +0100, martin f krafft wrote:
> I envision a tool (warning: braindump ahead) that we install *by
> default* on a standard system, which uses cron to wake up once a day
> and check online for important announcements regarding all installed
> packages, and mails them to root if any are found. I was thinking
> first to use the BTS for that, but we don't want that. The PTS also
> does not provide what we need for this, so it'd be another service,
> possibly one actually using the mirrors for distribution. And we'd
> need a policy/moderation so as to prevent spamming the users.
> 
> What do you think? Can we reuse our current infrastructure for this
> service?

I share your feeling about we lacking such a service, and I like idea of
setting up one.

Regarding how to implement it, the most interesting part seems to be
creating the server side part of the service and make DDs use it. I
agree with the user comment about using RSS for that.

"Just" set up an RSS feed, with tags for packages/tasks/whatever (what
about using debtags as feed tags? It would be super cool!) The goal
would be to let people subscribe to a personalized feed containing only
news about the packages he is interested in.

Once we have this part (which will probably be enough for many users),
we can think about how to deliver news to end-user machines. I can
imagine several: rss2email (just name your favorite tool), rss2motd,
rss2avian_carriers, ...

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- Computer Science PhD student @ Uny Bologna, Italy
zack@{cs.unibo.it,debian.org,bononia.it} -%- http://www.bononia.it/zack/
If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity
of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. -!-
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