Hi On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 11:33 AM, William Giokas <1007380@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 11:29:32AM -0700, Anatol Pomozov wrote:
Hi
On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 11:23 AM, Lukas Fleischer <archlinux@cryptocrack.de> wrote:
On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 11:12:05AM -0700, Anatol Pomozov wrote:
Hi,
I believe in automatization. Any routine work that can be done automatically should be done this way.
One such thing that can be improved in Arch project is discovering out-of-date packages. Currently it is done by users who go to https://www.archlinux.org/packages/ find the package and then click "Flag Package Out-of-Date" link. Why to bother users? Why not to let some bot to visit websites and check for new versions?
There are examples of package managers that have such functionality - macports http://guide.macports.org/chunked/reference.livecheck.html Their Portfiles can have information about how to find released files (using regexp). Then periodically (e.g. daily) a bot visits webpages, parses html and checks if new files are present.
Is it possible to have such functionality in pacman? It would save users time and make package update time lower.
Some developers and Trusted Users already use tools to check websites for updates. I agree that it might be better to do this in a central location but this is certainly not a pacman issue. Maybe we could add something to archweb (or just use a bot, as you already mentioned).
Sure, I can file a ticket against archweb.
But I believe PKGBUILD file should have a field that describes how to find a new version for the package.
There is already the url= field.
In theory the bot can use "source" field of PKGBUILD. e.g. source looks like source=("http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/$pkgname/$pkgname-$pkgver.src.tar.gz"{,.sig}) It can extract the archive url http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/$pkgname/$pkgname-$pkgver.src.tar.... and then try to probe newer $pkgver. Current version is XX.YY.ZZ so bot can try XX.YY.ZZ+1, XX.YY+1.0, XX+1.0.0 This should cover most projects updates. There are some cases when version is not numeric one e.g. includes -alpha, -beta -rc, or some other versioning.