This site is under construction. Please use Sourceforge's project page to try Papi.
Papi is a tool to automate the building of NOSRC rpms.
If you don't know what a nosrc.rpm is, or if you've never encountered one, then Papi is probably not for you. A nosrc.rpm is just like a regular source rpm (src.rpm), except it does not contain the source tarball for legal reasons. Those nosrc.rpms are used for example with java packages, or with acroread. It is common when the closed-source sofware is freely downloadable. The point of making a nosrc.rpm is to integrate the application in the distribution properly.
But rebuilding a nosrc.rpm requires a knowledge of rpm building, and this is where Papi comes in. Papi presents the user with a list of supported packages, points the user to the program's download page, lets the user download it, asks the user for the downloaded file and rebuilds the rpm automatically. Then the user can just install the resulting rpm like any other rpm.
What's important about Papi is that the user downloads the software by himself, and thus clicks on the legal "I agree" license agreements. The closed-source license is respected. Papi automates the rest.
Papi is available with dialog-based (text-based) and zenity-based (graphical) interfaces, and writing another interface is easy since it is very modular.
For the moment, Papi requires python >= 2.3, wget and python-dialog for the dialog interface.