What's the weather like in Debian?

One of the cool things developed during EDOS (now Mancoosi) has been edos-debcheck. Using it it is possible to check (incredibly quickly) whether some package in a given distribution cannot be installed according to its dependencies. When there are such packages it usually means that the distro is buggy s it is shipping uninstallable packages (there are some corner cases, but they are rare).

In fact, edos-debcheck has been run daily (as a service maintained by Ralf) on Debian's main suites and some derivatives for years now. The resulting list of uninstallable packages is linked from http://edos.debian.net and is being used by the QA team; I've no idea if it is being used by the Release Managers too, but it probably should be.

A cool toy built on top of edos-debcheck was the Debian weather (part of a more generic service called Anla, I'll blog about it sooner or later ...). Debian weather basically used to present the status of a given Debian-based distro in term of how many uninstallable packages were shipped using the weather metaphor: the fewer the uninstallable packages, the better the weather. I wrote "used to" because Anla was stopped about 1 year ago, and is being re-engineered these days.

In the meantime it was a pity not to have the Debian weather (as Enrico pointed out with me), so I spent some time to resurrect it on top of edos-debcheck daily runs: Debian weather is back, enjoy!