[Nix-dev] Auto package updating script

[Tobias Hunger]

On Thursday February 10 2011 00:17:26 Marc Weber wrote:
> We need such a tool. We already have two: the one written by Michael
> Raskin and my nix-repository-manager

I read through Michael's tool. I wrote my own one for several reasons:

 * I felt like doing so (a very poor reason:-)

 * Deciding on "newer versions" being available can be pretty tricky. I
   wanted to use something that has some track record of doing-the-
   right-thing(TM) and that is flexible enough to work with a wide variety
   of watched locations. I think uscan is such a tool.

 * I felt rather confused looking at .nix-files using Michael's tool. I am
   very new to nix in general, so that is most likely the reason for that:-) I
   find my template based approach is really simple to understand
   for newbies like me and it makes converting existing packages rather
   straight forward.

Some way to extract package name, version, url and hash from a simple
configuration file and make that available in nix would be even better, but I 
have not seen that yet. I really do not think it makes sense to have all that
static control information mixed into nix code since this makes it harder to 
upgrade using tools (be it syntax highlighters for text editors or automatic 
package upgraders).

> My tool currently supports only VCS (git,mercurial,cvs,). In contrast to
> fetchGit etc you can fetch incremental updates locally (my internet
> connection is slow) creating snapshots.
> I had in mind to make it accept input as used by Raskin.
> My tool does not require any additional files. it adds region markes:

Where can I find your tool?

> uscan looks pretty. I think the greatest value is contained in those
> control files. We should have a look at them and maybe we can share
> work.

Sure. I just wanted to present the fruits of one evening of hacking:-)

> Moreover it supports git and more in  funny way:

Oh, I doubt it is the perfect tool for git:-) But it does handle ftp and http 
rather well, incl. all the quirks you find when dealing with lots of real 
download sites!

I do not think uscan (which is basically a "version number guessing tool":-) 
is right for the job of watching VCS repositories.

Best Regards,
Tobias