[arch-general] 'Check out-of-date packages' tool

[Anatol Pomozov]

Hi everyone

Per discussion in 'pacman-dev' maillist [1] I implemented a tool that tries
to find Arch out-of-date packages. The tool scans PKGBUILD files is
/var/abs directory, extracts download url and then tries to probe download
urls for the next version. Next versions look like

X.Y.Z+1
X.Y+1.0
X+1.0.0

If any of the new versions presents on the download server it reports to
user as 'new version available'.

Here is the tool sources https://github.com/anatol/pkgoutofdate To make its
usage even more pleasant I added it to AUR
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pkgoutofdate-git/

To use it please install pkgoutofdate-git package:

$ yaourt -S pkgoutofdate-git

Then update abs database and run tool itself:

$ sudo abs && pkgoutofdate

That's it. The result looks like

.......
closure-linter: new version found - 2.3.8 => 2.3.9
perl-data-dump: new version found - 1.21 => 1.22
wgetpaste: new version found - 2.20 => 2.21
fillets-ng-data: new version found - 1.0.0 => 1.0.1
tablelist: new version found - 5.5 => 5.6
......


There are some fals positive and negative results though, mostly because
download servers return different sort of weird responses. I still work on
work-arounds for all these cases.

Hope you find this tool useful and it will help to make Arch software even
more bleeding edge.

[1]
https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2013-March/thread.html#16850