Who's the Fedora user?

[Jeff Spaleta]

> RSS ?

Several feeds already exist...take a look at the input feeds at
http://fedoraproject.org/infofeed/

I'm wary that the amount of information that floats by about all the
'new' packages that enter Extras is overwhelming to the average
computer user, and I want to do something primarily to make average
users aware of things they are iterested in..without overwhelming them
with information about every single perl package that makes it into
the tree. I think a trickle of targetted notification can be more
useful than a flood about everything that is going on. Just like when
we check for updates in yum or up2date, we dont tell users about ALL
updates..just the "interesting" ones for the client system.

If you want an rss feed of everything that is going on for fc4 extras
for example you use...
http://fedoraproject.org/infofeed/inputs/fc4-extras.xml
or
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/repodata/index.html
the RSS feed is basically similiar to
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/repodata/repoview/__latest__.group.html
or to what you get by using repo-rss from yum-utils

Just for example look at at __latest__-group.html from repoview.   How
many of those packages are essentially "greek" in Judy-speak to the
average user? I appreciate every single item in such a list. I
squirrel away that knowledge in the vast storehouse of obtuse linux
information that I call the part of my brain not soaked in alcohol.
But to my wife, and most likely to the now imfamous Judy, it bet its
uninteresting at best and confusing greek at worst.

> 
> Fedora already includes custom bookmarks with Firefox, so adding a "live
> bookmark" would be fairly trivial I guess.

Yes adding RSS feeds or bookmarks to the relevant fedorainfo and to
repoview for users who get hooked and want to go out and actively
learn about whats out there. But again I worry about overwhelming the
less technical user and I'd like to find a friendly way to expose them
to a trickle of new things they have self-selected as falling into an
"interesting" group without having them see all the development and
system library type packages..until they feel more at home with how
things work in linuxland.

-jef