[aur-general] pkgbuild - suggestion

[Jose Riha]

i think it is the job of a maintainer to keep the pkgbuild updated (while 
buildable at the same time). with keeping an eye on new upstream 
releases.. not sure. why the "notify" button on aur webpage exists in the 
first place. and then you also have pkgbuilds that lost their maintainers, 
maintainer became unresponsive (is on vacation, ill, whatever). in such 
cases you probably still want to be updated or at least be informed there 
are updates pending.

to be honest i did not think this through - having defined this as a 
function would indeed require repetitious pull from aur server which isn't 
ideal. running weekly checks on aur server itself i believe really defeats 
the kiss principle and picturing myself as an aur maintainer i would not 
like to do it.

thank you for suggesting urlwatch - seems like a nice tool that simply 
does the job. i was able to quickly cobble a oneliner to keep track of my 
favourite tool: gpsprune. all i had to do was just put the gpsprune 
website to urls.txt and define a hook that parses the useful information 
(i certainly do not want to watch changes on the whole page).

in the end it looks like this:

def filter(url, data):
     m = re.search(r'.*Runnable code(.+)\.jar.*',html2txt.html2text(data, method='re'), re.MULTILINE)
     return m.group(1)

now what if this is defined inside pkgbuild on a single line (so that it 
stays in the local db), for instance like this:

UrlWatcher=('http://activityworkshop.net/software/gpsprune/download.html','.*Runnable 
code(.+)\.jar.*',1)

i don't think this leaves much space for attacks on system 
security/integrity - the arguments are being parsed by urlwatcher, not 
executed.

so the idea is that i normally do yaourt -Syu --aur daily at present. 
wouldn't it be nice if one could do (say - once a week) yaourt -Syu --aur 
--check-up-stream-changes and get:

* gpsprune - possibly a new upstream version detected
?

cheers,

jose

On Wed, 17 Feb 2016, Eli Schwartz wrote:

> On 02/17/2016 05:11 PM, Jozef Riha wrote:
>> hello,
>>
>> this might not be a perfect place to propose new things to pkgbuild but
>> otoh it does affect pkgbuild and does make sense for aur packages. my point
>> is: at the moment the only way that the aur maintainers learn about
>> upstream version bump is either by a user notification system (flags on
>> aur) or some external (rss for instance) checks. this may work to some
>> extent but wouldn't it be nice if the checking function would be the part
>> of the pkgbuild (a new function alongside prepare(), build(), package()..)
>> and this function would be invoked by an aur wrapper such as yaourt?
>>
>> the implementation probably would not be trivial due to security concerns
>> but in the end, maybe having a possibility to process an html page with a
>> regex or read rss would be a good start.
>>
>> j
>>
>
> As you rightly pointed out, that is the job of the AUR *maintainer*.
>
>
> Check out urlwatch...
>
> -- 
> Eli Schwartz
>