» openSUSE contributed package aggregator

One of the major issues with contributed packages for SUSE Linux seems to have been that they are difficult to find, and that only part of the SUSE users are actually aware of Packman, my repository and the others. The other, in my opinion, is that we packagers don't communicate much and we sometimes end up with having the same package in several repositories, sometimes even conflicting and incompatible (e.g. because of the naming). I have some of those myself ;) To address the first problem, there are a couple of solutions that could work: » centralize all the contributed packages inside a same infrastructure, e.g. the openSUSE site » augment YaST2's package management module to have it fetch a list of contributor package repositories from a central location (opensuse.org would be my first guess) on the internet and propose to easily add some (or all) of them to the list of installation sources used by YaST2 » keep decentralized package repositories but aggregate them in some way on the openSUSE.org website A centralized site for all the packages is not feasible, as already shortly explained on the openSUSE mailing-list by Christoph Thiel, Robert Schiele and Christoph again. The 2nd and 3rd points share the same idea of keeping decentralized package repositories (more or less like now, although we need a lot more collaboration and communication to avoid incompatibilities, projects packaged several times, etc...) but aggregating them in some way, be it on openSUSE.org. More ideas on that later, but maybe having a kde-apps.org-like web interface (maybe even inside YaST2 ?), as Marco Maske has proposed, is an option as far as user-friendlyness is concerned. Nevertheless, as package managers and advanced users, we also need tools to see whether a piece of software is already packaged, where, in what version, in what state, see what packages are unmaintained, provide them on all supported architectures, etc...