Linux Software Map

[Computer Nerd Kev]

For people digging up old software:

https://xteddy.org/lsm
(Javascript required)

"The LSM (Linux Software Map) was an early database cataloguing
software developed for Linux (and other systems, such as *BSD). The
term LSM refers to both the file format itself, and the information
with which one could use it for.

The LSM was a good way to collate a central understanding of the
key software available at the time which could be coordinated
between different distributions. This was at a time when search
engines were of their infancy and software hub sites did not yet
really exist. Most software being developed at the time was
uploaded to FTP servers, or other self-hosted sites.

ibiblio holds the current format of the LSM itself, and at one
point in time allowed for it to be queried. Alas, it appears (as of
2022) that this is no longer the case.

This version found here is not queried server-side -- instead, the
data is loaded client-side and processed via the browser's DOM. It
is itself not a large dataset, and small enough to be done in this
way, but originally, this would not have been the case.

The data itself was extracted from the most recent copy of the LSM
available (http://lsm.qqx.org/lsm/LSM) and a quick script written
to parse it into something which can be queried via a JSON
interpreter.

-- Thomas Adam (November, 2022)" ...

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