[Nix-dev] GNUpdate, an automatic update tool for GNU packages

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> Nixpkgs now has a Guile script under maintainers/scripts/gnu/gnupdate
> that can be used to automatically update GNU packages in Nixpkgs.

Cool :-)

>   3. Traverse that SXML tree to identify GNU packages based on the
>      contents of ‘meta.description’ and ‘meta.homepage’.
> 
>   4. For each GNU package, find out the latest release by looking for it
>      on ftp.gnu.org or similar.

Would it be possible to generalise this to support arbitrary packages using
(maybe) some meta attributes specifying how to look for the latest package?
E.g., the URL of the page containing the latest releases, and so on - somewhat
similar to Michael Raskin's src-info-for-default.nix.

> Items #1 and #2 are serious bottlenecks in terms of performance and
> memory consumption.  Ideally, Eelco would provide us with a simple C API
> to the evaluator that people could easily wrap in their favorite
> language.  :-) 

There is a C++ API.  Would it possible to interface with that from Guile?

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/