another way for getting informed about new package versions

detto · 2006-10-05 18:46:07

Hey there!

I really appreciate the work that is done with archlinux. Loving the rolling release, got used to that way and it really is a breeze.
But from time to time there are some outdated packages. Usually those are not important ones (e.g. hal, dbus, kernel and so on) but applications e.g. from extra tree or others.

What im missing here is a way to easily check all packages versions for the latest and get informed if there is one outdated.
I have to mention Frugalware here which has a line called "up2date" in their FrugalBuild scripts. With one command one can check all buildfiles if for one package there is a newer version.
Here's an example of such a line:

up2date="lynx -dump http://www.xchat.org/|grep Source|sed 's/.* ([0-9.]*)$/1/'"

If it differs from $pkgver it will give an useful output.
And with this approach you can easily get all packages that need to be updated.

I think the way to implement this is not that hard. Look at some FrugalBuilds. Those up2date-lines of course should be the same ones. No editing necessary. Just copy paste and provide a command for that checking.

Developer team of ArchLinux then can easily check whats out of date which imo is much more convenience than the flag-out-of-date feature.

This is no offend but an improvement idea for AL and i hope you understand.

cheers,
detto

phrakture · 2006-10-05 19:14:25

Personally, I would rather find / host a service that does this. Freshmeat almost works, but it requires an app to be registered on freshmeat, and the owner to update when he updates his stuff (usually delayed a few days).

I thought about this at one point. It would be easy to create a DB of project names, "scriptlets" like above, and "current version", run through maybe 10 or so every few minutes (cron) and simply provide a web front end so that a GET of "/pkg/coreutils"
outputs the current stored version.

then "up2date" can simply query that service a few times

detto · 2006-10-05 20:14:10

That sounds very interesting/promising!
Any idea of a way implementing such a feature into archlinux? 8)

detto · 2006-10-09 18:57:26

Man this sounds really nice!
The benifit we would make, is gettin earlier informed than ever possible, i think, when there's a new version.
It just makes me mad that something like this hasnt found the way into Arch until yet, as it seems to make the maintaining of packages much more easily.
For me it would be one of the top priorities but what you think? Ok, pacman3 is something we all want to see rather soon

test1000 · 2006-10-09 19:25:19

i think it is a good idea but i like the idea most when it doesn't include any extra work for us PKGBUILD makers

Sure it would be nice if PKGBUILD makers(meaning everyone but TU's) would also make the sed string, and this should also be possible through some mechanism, but it should not be mandatory for AUR inclusion since this increases the barrier for PKGBUILD submittal even more and might hinder some people from submitting their PKGBUILDS to AUR because of the added complexity.

Not to mention it's not very KISS, and if I have the correct information we wouldn't want to be another debian when it comes to packagemaking barrier.

So TU's would have to do it, or not, they are humans too and should not be uneccessary burdened, but such a service should be a all-or-nothing service right? I mean if 70% of packages have a up2date url and within that 30% your package is, then needless to say you won't be very happy having to check the website manually.

It'll be a help though... but about the 'all-or-nothing' statement, that also applies to up2date up2date strings So it will be very important to keep this, well, up2date.

Maybe a up2date team can be assembled with access to this DB only? I'll volunteer.

detto · 2006-10-09 20:35:06

Mh, true true
Forgot to paste link here: http://frugalware.org/~vmiklos/stats/chkworld.html
That's the thing i meant. Well, as you can see and you guessed it already there are also packages with broken up2date line and also its not KISS'y :?
Hope we can include this or better: a similiar but nearly 100% working mechanism for that.

cheers,
detto

Arch Linux

#1 2006-10-05 18:46:07

another way for getting informed about new package versions

#2 2006-10-05 19:14:25

Re: another way for getting informed about new package versions

#3 2006-10-05 20:14:10

Re: another way for getting informed about new package versions

#4 2006-10-09 18:57:26

Re: another way for getting informed about new package versions

#5 2006-10-09 19:25:19

Re: another way for getting informed about new package versions

#6 2006-10-09 20:35:06

Re: another way for getting informed about new package versions

Board footer