[Nix-dev] Re: Tracking upstream releases

[Tony White]

Yeah, you can use wget to spider the repo and, pipe it's output to
grep and then use an if version string = greater than current version:
use it statement. I used a nice example of something like that when I
was tracking kernel releases without using nix or rss.
Spidering rss feeds will work for a good number of projects.
http://kernel.org/kdist/rss.xml is an excellent example of how
releases can be announced; although not everyone does it.

Thanks,
Tony

On 12/08/2009, Ludovic Courtès <ludo at gnu.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Michael Raskin <7c6f434c at mail.ru> writes:
>
>> Ludovic Courtčs wrote:
>>>> Or do we want to add kind of scripting language to extract updates from
>>>> *any* kind of html page presenting download links?
>>>
>>> IMO (and as discussed at
>>> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.nixos/2421) there
>>> should be a `meta.watchURL' attribute (or similar) specifying a regexp
>>> of URLs to be watched.
>>
>> I have written (for my own needs) some Lisp code for comfortable
>> extraction of urls (or what not) from a relatively regularly structured
>> HTML page. It allows to express the condition in terms of page layout
>> per se, not by regexps which have own problems for complicated parsing.
>
> That's neat, but it's often more than needed.
>
> For GNU projects, for instance, it's common for the web page to not
> contain a link to the latest tarball nor even the last version number.
> However, tarball URLs always follow the same scheme, so it's very easy
> from a series of `wget' (or something like "echo ls | lftp
> ftp.gnu.org/gnu/PROGRAM") to infer whether a new tarball is available.
>
> Thanks,
> Ludo'.
>
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