rpm2html generate automatically Web pages describing a set of RPM packages given as argument on the command line. The source is not yet available but preliminary result obtained by running it on a local mirror of Redhat-4.2 i386 distribution and the RedHat i386 contrib directory is available.
The goal of rpm2html is also to identify the dependancies between various packages, and being able to find the packages providing the ressources you need to install a given package. Every package is analyzed to retrieve it's dependancies and the ressources it offers, an these relationship are stored in the generated pages. Finding the package providing the ressource you need to install another one is just a matter of following the hypertext links :-).
The ultimate commodity is ensured by indexing this set of pages, allowing to find instantaneously the package profiding the desired functionnalities (as long as the package maintainer has properly commented the RPM).
Here is the result of this indexing for around 1700 RPMs:
rpm2html is only in it's infancy, but may prove useful, unfortunately, most of the FTP links won't work yet, this will be fixed soon ! I also expect to ship the code ASAP.
Performance-wise, the actual code is Ok, generating the full set of pages from approximately 1700 packages, took 45 seconds on a PPro, and is clearly I/O bound.
Two other good directories for Linux applications are:
Daniel
Daniel Veillard, Tue Nov 11 20:17:37 1997