The MacPorts project does this well with their 'livecheck', and it is
indeed a very valuable feature, especially for maintainers of many ports.
I have mine on a cron job, and I get emails when new versions are
released, and I know a few others who have done the same for their
respective ports.
MacPorts' livecheck feature allows you to specify a url and a regex just
for the livecheck (with sane defaults of-course). For every match of the
regex, the capture-group is intelligently compared against the current
version of the port, and if outdated, the current and alleged new
versions are displayed for manual verification.
I can't seem to find concrete examples right now, but I'm fairly certain
that there have been cases where a regex was really necessary to extract
the version, and certainly cases where semi-intellegent (at least more
than !=) comparison is necessary to differentiate between "new" and
"different" versions, especially for small software which only has one
page with all the information about the project.
Another thing they did was to define a mapping between common places
that distribute software (github, sourceforge, freecode, bitbucket,
savannah, etc.) and default version-information-containing-pages
relative to the project page - often some kind of machine-friendly
download index or rss-feed of version updates or such. This seems to
work well and de-duplicates much effort on the part of porters, as often
these indexes for common distributors are the most reliable, and
non-obvious.
So, I realize it's adding more complexity, but I would suggest taking
the lessons learned from them and making this system slightly more
flexible. I think the distributor mapping may be too much against KISS,
but the regex and smarter version comparison is imho definitely worthwhile.
Regardless of the implementation, I still think it's a good idea. That
said, I'm not (yet) an OpenBSD porter, so take this all with a grain of
salt as I don't fully understand the needs of OpenBSD's porting ecosystem.
On 1/19/14 8:38 AM, Sergey Bronnikov wrote:
> Hi
>
> OpenBSD project has ports tree which contains a lot of applications
> (about 8k in latest release).
> I believe it is a lot of pain for maintainers of these ports to keep
> port in 'up to date' state and not less pain to keep eyes on
> the latest version of applications.
> I suggest to implement target in bsd.port.mk which allows to check
availability of new app version
> for each port. It is based on fact that developers publish archives with
latest version but archive
> has fixed name.
> Patch implements that idea is attached. It is a little bit ugly,
> but it can say more than words above.
>
> I have found al least 7 projects where developers publish such archives.
> They are: redis, samba, gnu tar, webmin, ruby, videolan, mercurial.
> Patches for database/redis and net/samba ports are attached.
>
> And now it looks like:
>
> $ make check-latest
> ===> Checking files for redis-2.8.3
> `/usr/ports/distfiles/redis-2.8.3.tar.gz' is up to date.
> ===> Checking files for redis-2.8.3
> `/usr/ports/distfiles/redis-stable.tar.gz' is up to date.
> File redis-2.8.3.tar.gz has newer version
>
> Sergey B.
> Index: bsd.port.mk
> ===================================================================
> RCS file: /cvs/ports/infrastructure/mk/bsd.port.mk,v
> retrieving revision 1.1255
> diff -u -p -r1.1255 bsd.port.mk
> --- bsd.port.mk 9 Jan 2014 10:44:33 -0000 1.1255
> +++ bsd.port.mk 19 Jan 2014 13:13:33 -0000
> @@ -399,6 +399,9 @@ CONFIGURE_ENV += CCACHE_DIR=${CCACHE_DIR
> BUILD_DEPENDS += devel/ccache
> .endif
>
> +DISTNAME_LATEST ?=
> +MASTER_SITES_LATEST ?=
> +
> ALL_FAKE_FLAGS= ${MAKE_FLAGS:N-j[0-9]*} ${DESTDIRNAME}=${WRKINST}
${FAKE_FLAGS}
>
> .if ${LOCALBASE:L} != "/usr/local"
> @@ -2240,7 +2243,7 @@ _internal-fetch:
> . if !empty(CHECKSUMFILES)
> @${_MAKE} ${CHECKSUMFILES:S@^@${DISTDIR}/@}
> . endif
> -# End of FETCH
> +# End of FETCH:
>
>
> _internal-checksum: _internal-fetch
> @@ -3298,6 +3301,26 @@ _recurse-show-run-depends:
> exit 1; \
> fi; \
> done
> +
> +check-latest: makesum
> +.if !empty(DISTNAME_LATEST)
> + @${MAKE} fetch DISTFILES=${DISTNAME_LATEST}${EXTRACT_SUFX} \
> + MASTER_SITES=${MASTER_SITES_LATEST}
> +
> + @for c in ${_CIPHERS:U}; do \
> + fgrep ${DISTNAME} ${CHECKSUM_FILE} | \
> + fgrep $$c | awk '{ print $$NF }' | \
> + while read f; do \
> + cd ${DISTDIR} && cksum -b -q -a $$c
> ${DISTNAME_LATEST}${EXTRACT_SUFX} |
\
> + while read k; do \
> + if test $$f != $$k; then \
> + echo 1>&2 "File ${DISTFILES} has newer
> version"; \
> + exit; \
> + fi; \
> + done; \
> + done; \
> + done;
> +.endif
>
> show-run-depends:
> .if !empty(_RUN_DEP)
> Index: Makefile
> ===================================================================
> RCS file: /cvs/ports/net/samba/Makefile,v
> retrieving revision 1.189
> diff -u -p -r1.189 Makefile
> --- Makefile 5 Dec 2013 13:08:50 -0000 1.189
> +++ Makefile 19 Jan 2014 13:15:29 -0000
> @@ -16,6 +16,9 @@ SHARED_LIBS= smbclient 3.0 \
> netapi 1.0 \
> wbclient 1.0
>
> +DISTNAME_LATEST= samba-latest
> +MASTER_SITES_LATEST= https://www.samba.org/samba/ftp/
> +
> CATEGORIES= net
>
> HOMEPAGE= http://www.samba.org/
> Index: Makefile
> ===================================================================
> RCS file: /cvs/ports/databases/redis/Makefile,v
> retrieving revision 1.61
> diff -u -p -r1.61 Makefile
> --- Makefile 15 Jan 2014 07:08:13 -0000 1.61
> +++ Makefile 19 Jan 2014 13:16:02 -0000
> @@ -7,6 +7,9 @@ HOMEPAGE = http://redis.io/
>
> MAINTAINER = David Coppa <dco...@openbsd.org>
>
> +DISTNAME_LATEST = redis-stable
> +MASTER_SITES_LATEST = http://download.redis.io/
> +
> # BSD
> PERMIT_PACKAGE_CDROM = Yes
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