On Fri, January 27, 2006 11:16 pm, Lapo Luchini wrote: > John Morrison wrote: >> Freshmeat do a number of RSS feeds see <http://freshmeat.net/backend/> >> for >> the list. >> > Mhh, neat. > Problem is: freshmeat is not /always/ updated.
How about <http://distrowatch.com/news/dwp.xml>? or scraping <http://distrowatch.com/packages.php>? > rsync, as an example, is at release 2.6.0, while truly it is a 2.6.6 > last time I (manually) checked. Distrowatch reports 2.6.6 >> Perhaps <http://rss.freshmeat.net/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-unix> >> would >> be the best? Can perl consume RSS feeds? >> > IMHO the best is to stick with the URL+regular expression form: it an > RSS is available it's only easier to "parse" (less thing on the "page" > that may falsely match the r.e.) > > While using the official homepage: > http://rsync.samba.org/ > > % links -source "http://rsync.samba.org/" | egrep -o > "[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+ released" | head -n 1 > 2.6.6 released > > Parsing the FTP directory would be even less error-prone, if available. > > Uhm... an approach like this can't as reliable as being "the final anwer > to update notifications", but IMHO can surely help. > More so if each package has /more/ than one address (frashmeat, > homepage, ftp) so that if some of the sources fail or change format, the > others are still up (a different page could show red lines in the ones > that failed to parse the last few days, something like that). > > My approach to that would probably include PHP and a sqlite database. > If there is some interest in it I could develop and mantain it. Fair enough - I never (well, rarely!) argue with somebody who's willing to put the effort in :) J.