Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How is this different from release-monitoring.org?

Fedora's release-monitoring.org is essentially a giant periodic scraper of tens of thousands of package webpages. Upon detecting a new version of any of those packages, it publishes messages to an AMQP broker. Its scraping of package homepages is what powers this website; this service does no scraping of its own. However, while the Fedora ecosystem does provide the ability to get email notifications for package updates, it may not be immediately obvious how to do so. It requires looking up the package you want on release-monitoring.org, creating a Fedora FAS account, then going to http://apps.fedoraproject.org/notifications/ and then setting up custom filters there.

If you know where to look, this is not terribly onerous, the entire process takes maybe five minutes. However, if all you want is email notifications of new package versions, there's no reason it should be any more complicated than a single form with two fields: a package field, and an email address field. That's what this project is! Removing all the accidental complexity so that you just have those two boxes.

Q: Is there any official relationship between this project and release-monitoring.org?

This is just a fun one-man side project. This project has not received any official endorsement from the maintainers of release-monitoring.org. In fact I would be mildly surprised if they'd heard of this website. This service just subscribes to the public AMQP brokers that release-monitoring.org graciously provides.

Q: What if I want to add a new package which currently does not exist?

To add a package you'll need to use release-monitoring.org directly, which means you'll probably want an account with Fedora FAS if you don't already have one. If your package already uses GitHub, GitLab, or BitBucket for releases or is a package on npm, PyPI, Rubygems, crates.io, Hackage, etc., once you have an account set up, it is often a matter of seconds to create a new package.

Q: Do you share my email address with any other services?

No! Absolutely not. Your email addresses are never shared with any other party and certainly are not sent off to be harvested in some giant email list somewhere.

Q: How do I unsubscribe from notifications about new versions for a package?

Upon subscribing to a package you will be emailed a unique unsubscribe link for that package which you can use to unsubscribe from notifications for that package.

Q: How do I prevent my email address from being signed up for notifications I didn't want?

You will be sent a confirmation link first when your email address is entered. Notifications about new package versions will only be sent to you if you follow the instructions on that confirmation link.

Q: How do I remove my email address from this service?

Simply unsubscribe to all package notifications you are currently subscribed to. Your email address will be automatically deleted within an hour.

Q: If I don't remember which packages I'm subscribed to, or otherwise am having difficulties unsubscribing what can I do?

Please email admin at the URL of this website detailing the problems you're running into and I'll do my best to help you out.

Q: Where is the source code for this service?

The source code for this lives at https://github.com/changlinli/notify-new-package.