⏳geol, the cli to efficiently manage EOLs like a boss

Hacktoberfest: Maintainer Spotlight

This is a submission for the 2025 Hacktoberfest Writing Challenge: Maintainer Spotlight

🤗 Building ideas & patterns before software

First of all, I would like to point what makes my core motivation & energy last, what keeps me in movement : my curiosity.
I only understood recently that this is curiosity and the satisfaction we get once got answers that (from my POV) makes things possible.

Of course we are building software or products, but first, I want to focus on creating and experimenting news ways of viewing problems that affect us and prototype new ways of fixing issues (regardless of programming languages or technologies) or rewiring known problems, then share these techniques and POVs with others to confront perspectives.

Nothing excites me more that seeing the solution come to life, talk with my teammates about how to tweak an output, what to remove until we get something really useful and pleasant.

Some call this being nerd… I don’t care but what I enjoy the most is talking about software engineering, DEVOPS and architecture while enjoying a coffee, drawing something on a paper, challenging perspectives and make it happen on a schedule, at a regular pace… and gain experience.

💭 About the core idea

Back in time time in January, I submitted a first try to porting eol to a golang stack :

Also I previously talked – a lot – about these data and why it matters:

I wanted to push a bit much further around around stack lifecycle management and bring DEVOPS,DEVSECOPS and SECOPS to the front and imagine complementary practices to automate things around that.

After a paper and pen ideation session :

I finally opted for a full unboxing video that would focus on the MVP, from start to end.

🍿 Unboxing demo

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Team mates

Innovation is much more interesting when it’s achieved with other people, below the core team:

🎯 Our MVP

I designed a MVP milestone to be sure to be ready to deliver for D-day and at last deliver the demo:

🤩 What we learned and techniques we developed on the journey

🧰 Stack

➿ cli design tuning with AI

I used gemini-cli and crush to continuously evaluate & improve the design of our cli : which command to add, examples to provide, better options, option names, sub-commands layouts,…

👉 Our goal was to achieve zero-prompts answers, eg. :

1. Ask the agent “learn to use geol thanks to man pages” (it appeared than, after benchmarking, man was the best option)
2. Challenge the assistant to produce new kind of documents, for example with the help of third parties cli like trivy or grype

📰 Original report productions

I challenged geol and trivy as data producers, gemini-cli as thinker to efficiently produce LaTeX some original reports pretty easily and share them:

🔭 Further ideas

Below some features to be implemented that excites us a lot:

🙌 Last words

This project makes us learn a lot about software packaging, distribution, make choice to be sure to deliver the most important useful features, also carefully not implement the things that should not be… and learn learn and learn about free software.