A package search engine for Linux repositories

Most of us spend a significant amount of time in front of our computers searching for information – whether in the browser via a search engine, in the filesystem with commands like find and locate, or with graphic tools. One of the commands most frequently used with us, whohas, determines which distributions have which version of a specific package in their archives. Using this command can be frustrating: whohas does not support all distributions, and not all distributions' repositories can be reached at the time of a query.

In a search for alternatives, I came across a genuine treasure chest, Repology [1], a web app that lists the software packages of many distributions. It retrieves this data hourly directly from the distributions' repositories. Repology links together a versatile set of information about the individual packages. At the time of writing, Repology covered more than 120 repositories with over 2.5 million packages.

Repology, which is implemented in Python, is maintained on GitHub [2]. Besides the archives of Linux distributions, Repology also integrates some BSD projects' data. In addition, Repology tracks the activities in repositories such as Deb Multimedia, RPM Fusion, Chocolatey, F-Droid, Homebrew, and many others.

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