4 cool new projects to try in COPR for December 2021

Copr is a build system for anyone in the Fedora community. It hosts thousands of projects for various purposes and audiences. Some of them should never be installed by anyone, some are already being transitioned to the official Fedora Linux repositories, and the rest is somewhere in between. Copr gives you the opportunity to install third party software that is not available in Fedora Linux repositories, try nightly versions of your dependencies, use patched builds of your favorite tools to support some non-standard use cases, and just experiment freely.

If you don’t know how to enable a repository or if you are concerned about whether is it safe to use Copr, please consult the project documentation.

This article takes a closer look at interesting projects that recently landed in Copr.

Glow

Glow is a markdown reader for the command line. It automatically discovers markdown files in git projects and subdirectories, but it also allows you to specify a local path or an online URL when starting the program. Glow also provides integration with the Charm Cloud and allows you to stash files in your private, end-to-end encrypted collection.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides Glow for Fedora Linux 34, 35, and Fedora Rawhide. To install it, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable keefle/glow
sudo dnf install glow

Purple-googlechat

Are you required to use Google Chat and dislike the web-based interface? The purple-googlechat plugin for Pidgin and many other chat programs might save you. Purple is a library for connecting to IM networks. This purple-googlechat plugin provides support for Google Chat in your favorite chat program.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides purple-googlechat for Fedora Linux 34, 35, and Fedora Rawhide. To install it, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable praiskup/purple-googlechat
sudo dnf install purple-googlechat

Git-insight

Git-insight renders colorful graphs for git repository statistics. The output is comparable to what GitHub shows in the Insights tab of your projects, but in the command-line, and not limited to any git forge. It allows you to easily see the top contributors, the most frequently updated files, number of commits in each branch, all-time trends, and more.

Installation instructions

The repo currently provides git-insight for Fedora Linux 34, 35, and Fedora Rawhide. To install it, use these commands:

sudo dnf copr enable avimehenwal/git-insight
sudo dnf install git-insight

Nightly builds

This time we have something completely different but well representative of one of the main Copr use-cases. That is development (or nightly) versions of packages that are normally in the official Fedora Linux repositories. This may be interesting if you want to try the most recent version of some application to see if a particular bug was fixed or if a new feature behaves as expected. Also, for software developers, it may be useful to test their code against the most up-to-date dependencies.

Many projects build their nightly versions in Copr. Namely, Dnf, Mock, Firefox, PipeWire, FreeCAD, KiCad, Neovim, MicroShift, and many, many more.