Vendors, I have a simple request for you: give me an RSS feed for your security fixes and system updates. No, please don't suggest that I subscribe to your email announcement list, because these days email is just too much of a hassle. Accept it; RSS is the new lightweight notification format, and notification of new updates is just what I want.

And don't just give us one global RSS feed of everything. Be modern; let people get narrow feeds as well as broad ones. Easier yet, tag all of your updates and let people subscribe to tags and combinations of tags.

Existing feeds

Debian Security has a feed for Debian security updates. The version that includes the first paragraph, so you can see some details about each issue, is here [RSS feed].

Fedora Core doesn't have an explicit feed, but we can fake it by getting an RSS feed of the Fedora announcements list from gmane.org. The 'full text of all messages' version is here [RSS feed]. The Fedora announcements list isn't just package updates, but it's close enough for my purposes.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has an announcements mailing list too, and thus a similar feed here [RSS feed].

Note that you can use gmane.org this way for any project that has a reasonably non-noisy announcements mailing list (if gmane.org doesn't already carry it, you can ask them to subscribe). Go wild.

(gmane.org is quite cool and worth a look in general; I wrote about it before in GmanePointer.)