A package search engine for Linux repositories

Who Maintains Firefox?

To find out who bundles Firefox for which distribution, click on Maintainers in the upper left corner. For a successful search, you need the maintainer's email address or nickname, which you should find in the Versions view with any luck.

I wanted to see what Mike Hommey, Mozilla developer and Debian package maintainer for Firefox, has been doing. After entering his Debian email address, clicking on the link opens the page showing Hommey's activities in terms of Firefox packaging. This includes information about distributions that use these Firefox packages, the number of packages, and how up-to-date they are. A click on the respective distributions to which Hommey delivers takes you directly to the distribution page within Repology with further general information (Figure 6).

Figure 6: The Maintainer view shows where packages by Firefox maintainer Mike Hommey are used.

Statistics and Graphs

The Repositories tab leaves the Firefox project and gives a general overview of Repology divided into the subcategories Statistics, Packages, Graphs, Updates, and Fields.

Statistics displays information about the number of packages, how up-to-date they are, and the number of maintainers, broken down by distribution and their last releases. At the time of publication, Repology is aware of 190,374 projects with a total of 2,507,760 individual packages.

Packages provides details about packages in each distribution. The abbreviations above the columns are defined as soon as you mouse over them.

Graphs evaluates the information in graphs, while Updates shows when a distribution last updated the packages (Figure 7). In Fields, Repology reveals what information the distributions provide for their packages. This ranges from a summary of the software and its maintainer to the website and license.

Figure 7: Updates shows when activity in each repository last took place. Among other things, both successful and failed build processes are displayed.

Additional Information

The Tools tab provides additional tools. Project by package lets you generate a link to Repology project pages and badges. Trending and declining projects shows projects that have been added or deleted in the past month. This tool is practical if you are looking for interesting projects that are just starting to take off.

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