Since Red Hat started discussing Software Collections (SCLs), a lot of folks have expressed interest in building or using community-driven Software Collections for Fedora, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today, we're happy to take the wraps off of SoftwareCollections.org – a project dedicated to helping the community create, maintain, and distribute SCLs. 

What's SoftwareCollections.org?

As you already know, Software Collections make it possible to use different versions of system software like newer (or, perhaps, older!) versions of Python, Ruby, MySQL, and so on. You can already find quite a few SCLs for Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL. But what if what you're looking for (or looking to provide) isn't one of those collections? That's where SoftwareCollections.org fits in.

It's easy to create your own SCLs for internal consumption or distribution, but if you want to extend your reach it can get a bit more complicated. The SoftwareCollections.org Project provides additional tools and a gathering point for the community to ask questions, share best practices, and collaborate on SCls for widespread distribution. Specifically, you'll find:

  • A Directory of publicly available SCLs, allowing users to distribute SCLs, search for SCLs, and consume existing collections easily.
  • Integration with the Copr build system. 
  • Mailing lists for discussions related to packaging SCLs.
  • Documentation on packaging your own SCLs.

For a more detailed tour of SoftwareCollections.org, check out our Tour of SoftwareCollections.org post.

Have Questions?

Have questions? Shoot us an email on the sclorg mailing list! We're looking forward to helping you get started using SoftwareCollections.org.


About the author

Joe Brockmeier is the editorial director of the Red Hat Blog. He also acts as Vice President of Marketing & Publicity for the Apache Software Foundation.

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