What's the best way to programmatically detect the most recent release of DMD and others?

[Andrew Edwards via Digitalmars-d-learn]

The best way I know to determine the latest DMD release is 
http://ftp.digitalmars.com/LATEST. I'm not aware that such a file 
exists for LDC and GDC so I'm currently doing:

string latest(string url) {
    return executeShell("git ls-remote --tags " ~ url ~ " | cut 
-d 'v' -f 2 | cut -d '-' -f 1 | cut -d '^' -f 1 | uniq | tail -n 
1").output.strip;
}
Is there a better way?

Thanks,
Andrew