This is an experiment in providing a JSON view of different package repositories.
The idea is to make package metadata easily consumable across a range of package formats by normalising the metadata.
Given a document describing two repositories, one Ubuntu and one CentOS:
{
"distribution": {
"name": "ubuntu",
"release": "10.04",
"platform_family": "debian",
"url": "http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu/dists/lucid/main/binary-amd64/Packages.bz2"
},
"distribution": {
"name": "centos",
"release": "5",
"platform_family": "rhel",
"url": "http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/centos/5/os/x86_64/repodata/primary.xml.gz"
}
}Then mdpkg should make some basic information available about each package:
$ curl 'http://metapackage.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ubuntu/10.04/apache2'
{
"package": {
"name": "apache2",
"architecture": "amd64",
"version": "2.2.14-5ubuntu8"
}
}