Monday, April 30, 2012

How to find the upstream website of a package in Fedora or any other rpm based linux distribution?

What is upstream in opensource?
Package maintainers in linux distributions like Fedora would build and submit rpm packages of any opensource software which they think would be useful to be included in Fedora. The people who originally created the software is called upstream.

How to see upstream website url?
The website url of the upstream software maintainer is included in the rpm spec file. The url can be seen in the output of 'rpm -qi command'. For example, to see the upstream url of vpnc rpm package.

$ rpm -qi vpnc|grep URL
URL         : http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/vpnc/