So initially I looked into planet software I could run on the OSGi server. I found Planet 2.0 and Venus which is a fork or successor to Planet 2.0. Both of these are Python scripts which of course depend upon other python scripts. However I could get neither of them to work on the RHEL 4 based OSGi server. The runtests.py sanity test failed for each choice. The failures were different and are probably based upon the Python version on the RHEL 4 system and possibly some dependent python scripts I did not have installed. Given that RHN manages the OS including the Python version, I was not keen to attempt to update it to a later version of Python that I would have to manage myself. And so I gave up on the python scripts. I have the feeling that if these tools were written in Java (or some JVM based language) it would have been mush easier to get them to run on different machines since there is a uniform basic machine and libraries to depend upon.
In any case, I needed some other solution. Some more use of a popular search engine lead me to Yahoo Pipes. I was fairly easily able to create a "pipe" to collect a bunch of feeds, sort the feeds by publication date and generate a new feed of the aggregate! I had heard of Yahoo Pipes before but never played with them. They are pretty cool and it was quite easy to mash up a bunch of feeds into a new feed.
So checkout the new Planet OSGi feed
served up by Yahoo Pipes.
