rpm2html : a generator of Web pages for RPM packages

Goal

rpm2html automatically generate Web pages describing a set of RPM packages. Preliminary results obtained by running it on a local mirror of Redhat distribution and the RedHat contrib directores are available. SuSE-5.1 RPM packages have been added as well a XFree86 updates from SuSE, especially useful for the new chipsets. I added also OpenLinux Lite 1.1.1 to the list of dristribution, and added warning when a package doesn't provide a correct set of resources.

The goals of rpm2html are also to identify the dependencies between various packages and to find the package(s) providing the resources needed to install a given package. Every package is analyzed to retrieve its dependencies and the resources it offers. These relationships are expressed using hyperlinks in the generated pages. Finding the package providing the resource you need is just a matter of a few clicks!

The ultimate commodity is ensured by indexing this set of pages, allowing the user to find instantaneously the package(s) providing any given functionality (as long as the package maintainer has properly commented the RPM).

Rpm2html now support RDF encoding and decoding of RPM metadata. The long term goal is to provide metadata information for RPM packages on a large scale and use them to automate searching, installing and upgrade linux packages.

News

rpm2html-0.90 is out ! A lot of new stuff, e.g. tree dump, a lot of cleanups.
But basically the main improvement is the support for RDF encoding of RPM metadata. One can also regenerate the HTML pages just from the metadata , read about mirroring plans.
Instructions are available for those of you who would like to run a mirror of the rpm2html Web pages.

Try it !

Here is the result of this indexing for approximately 8500 RPMs.

Documentation

An help page for navigating generated pages
A man(1) like on-line page. The actual rpm2html.1 file distribued is outdated.
How to set-up a mirror of the RPM database.

Other sites using rpm2html

Sources and binaries

rpm2html-0.90 sources are available as a gzipped tar file and as a source RPM .
binaries are available as an RPM for i386/glibc.

Copyright

This software is released under the GPL, use free software!

History

Feedback

I am looking for volunteers to do localization of the output files. The process is simple, one just have to translate the message file. Use "rpm -dumplang msg.local" and translate the text in msg.local. I already have French, Spanish and German localized messages.

I am looking for other sites to provide the same service, I hope others will follow and that this service will be provided worldwide.

To ease the installation of rpm2html and get feedback on it's developement, a mailing-list has been created, it's majordomo based and run on rufus.w3.org. Hence, to subscribe, send a mail to majordomo@rufus.w3.org with the following in the body of the message:

subscribe rpm2html

Archives of the mailing-list are available on line.