[aur-general] Maintaining octave-forge packages

[Clemens Buchacher]

Hi,

I am maintaining a lot of octave-forge packages:

 https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&K=octave-

I have a hard time keeping up with the upstream package updates. I have
implemented a script which will update the PKGBUILD by determining the
latest verison, downloading the package, and reading meta-data such as
dependencies and licensing information from the octave package
description:

 https://github.com/drizzd/octave-forge-archlinux/blob/master/newpkg

Still, it is some manual effort to figure out which packages are
outdated, run the script for each, build and test, make a source package
and upload.

Is it possible to integrate the script in the PKGBUILD itself? Such that
it will automatically download the latest package version? That comes
with the risk that an upstream release breaks the build (it happened a
couple of times over the last years). But I think it's better than not
being able to update the PKGBUILDs in time.

Many of the octave-* packages not owned by me are not updated at all,
which is why I hesitate to simply orphan them. I would be happy to use a
dedicated account for octave-* packages which I could share with other
maintainers. Is it ok to create such a shared account?

Cheers,
Clemens