On 24/03/13 19:23, Lukas Fleischer 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One such thing that can be improved in Arch project is discovering out-of-date packages.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it is done by users who go to https://www.archlinux.org/packages/ find the package and then click "Flag Package Out-of-Date" link.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).
IIRC most Dev/TU's use urlwatcher. Adding it to archweb would indeed awesome. The archweb code is available at [1]. [1] https://projects.archlinux.org/archweb.git/