In trying to drum up a little publicity and community involvement for Current I posted this on the Current Announcements page which I hope will appear in Tigris’s main announcement stream.

On October 25th Oracle announced Unbreakable Linux and the Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). The ULN is Oracle’s web based application to manage licenses and software updates for Unbreakable Linux. Under the hood of the Oracle Apex web interface to the ULN lies a small open source project called Current.

Current is a tool to deploy and manage the sets of packages installed on an RPM based Linux distribution. It has been used in production environments with thousands of Linux clients. It works with with Up2date and newer versions add support for using Yum against a Current server.

Originally, Current was designed to be an open source Red Hat Network (RHN) server. Today, the Current developers believe in creating a much more powerful and useful tool. We believe that there is value in strongly authenticated package repositories, an advanced web management interface, client tracking tools, and a flexible system for grouping and permissions. Many of the exiting management tools limit our freedom as they are controlled by corporations and closed source. Other open source tools lack strong authentication and management features. Simply, we believe that the Open Source community can create a significantly more useful management and deployment tool.

Current is licensed under the GNU General Public License and written in Python. As of this writing the latest stable version is 1.6.1 and the development version is 1.7.6. While several entities have created web interfaces for Current, the Current project’s web interface is in the very beginning stages of development. The Current project is actively looking for contributors to help develop the web interface. For more information please see the project’s web site at http://current.tigris.org_