Free Software Directory meeting recap for March 31st, 2017

Every week free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on irc.freenode.org to help improve the Free Software Directory. This recaps the work we accomplished at the Friday, March 31st, 2017 meeting.

This week we were back to online only mode for our Directory meeting. Leading up to the meeting, iankelling did a bunch of work using a new script to enable working offline on the Directory. Using the new tool they created, they were able to go through and approve pending changes for a massive number of packages, virtually wiping out the backlog on unapproved changes. We also discussed an ongoing issue with the Directory where re-directs show up as new entries that can't be approved in the normal fashion. While you can still go through and approve from some places (like the unapproved pages listing), it is not intuitive when first encountering the issue.

The meeting was also joined by our friend jgay, who previously led the Directory meetings when they worked at the Free Software Foundation. They helped give some background on a discussion of operating systems being in the Directory. While the Directory is for particular packages rather than an entire distro (if you're looking for a free distro check out our list of endorsed GNU/Linux distros) but they can be helpful for tagging other projects. In addition, some operating systems for small devices in a way do make sense to be treated as a single package that users might want to find. We are still sorting through the issues on that front on how exactly operating systems should be treated in the Directory.

If you would like to help update the directory, meet with us every Friday in #fsf on irc.freenode.org from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC).