2010-02-24

Hermes & Gitorious - Commication & Collaboration: The openSUSE Ecosystem, Part 6

On Thursday, February 4th I gave a talk for the Bellingham Linux Users Group (BLUG), 'touring' openSUSE 11.2 as a desktop OS, and giving a broad overview of the projects and community that culminates in the openSUSE Linux distribution. For those who missed it, here's part six of the written interpretation of my discussion.

Hermes: They get the word out, you hear it your way. hermes.opensuse.org

Hermes is described as a "personal message dispatcher." (What?) In short, Hermes' administrators define 'resources' (sources of information that update Hermes when something noteworthy happens), and 'agents' (interfaces to communication systems: web pages, RSS feeds, emails, Jabber IM, Twitter). You, the end user, create 'preferences': what resources do I want to follow, and which agent should notify me? In the background, Hermes uses 'relays' (scalable scheduled processes) to find matches between your 'preferences' and incoming messages from 'resources', then route them to the appropriate 'agent'.


Still confused? Here are some examples:
  • I want to be emailed daily with the status of my projects from openSUSE Build Service.
  • I want an RSS feed of features I'm following in openFATE.
  • I want to follow a public twitter feed of all OBS activity ( @OBSHermes )
Hermes is an up-and-coming project, aimed at making it easy to keep up to date by any means you prefer. As more projects are added as resources, I expect it to become the standard for project status communication.


Gitorious is an open-source server for centralizing git (distributed version control system) repositories. Gitorious.org implements the gitorious server for hosting open-source applications. Its open nature and implementation quality have attracted some of the largest open-source
projects out there, including:
If you're looking for a safe place to host your open-source project, it will be in good company on Gitorious.

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