[Nix-dev] Re: Auto package update script v4

[Tobias Hunger]

Sorry, resending this to the list:

On Friday 25 February 2011 11:41:59 you wrote:
> > Of course that would be possible. But why? To avoid two lines that do
> > provide interesting information
> 
> Well, “interesting” is a bit strong IMO.

I do find it interesting to know whether a package will be updated or not.

> The thing is gnupdate has been able to update it without ‘watchExpr’ for
> some time.

Of course it does: It is tailored to gnu packages. It is really straight 
forward to support any one source of packages.

It should be possible to come up with some generic support for some
of the sites in the mirrors list, but most will not work out of the box 
(different numbering schemes in the files, directory structures, etc.) anyway. 
Gnu might be the sole exception to this rule:-)

> I like the idea of having a tool to help automatic updates, and not just
> for GNU.  But I wish you’d taken the route of generalizing gnupdate
> instead of rolling your own, since it’s at least the third attempt in
> that area.  (Not to mention my taste for Perl...)

I am not going to learn a programming language to hack together a couple
of lines of code.

Yes, perl is ugly, but uscan was already written in that and I did not want to 
add another language into the mix.

> Thanks,
> Ludo’.