upstream update nitify [Was: maybe-ITP: bsdiff]

[Lapo Luchini <lapo dot luchini at gmail dot com>]

John Morrison wrote:
> Freshmeat do a number of RSS feeds see <http://freshmeat.net/backend/> for
> the list.
>   
Mhh, neat.
Problem is: freshmeat is not /always/ updated.

rsync, as an example, is at release 2.6.0, while truly it is a 2.6.6
last time I (manually) checked.
> Perhaps <http://rss.freshmeat.net/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-unix> would
> be the best?  Can perl consume RSS feeds?
>   
IMHO the best is to stick with the URL+regular expression form: it an
RSS is available it's only easier to "parse" (less thing on the "page"
that may falsely match the r.e.)

While using the official homepage:
http://rsync.samba.org/

% links -source "http://rsync.samba.org/"; | egrep -o
"[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+ released" | head -n 1
2.6.6 released

Parsing the FTP directory would be even less error-prone, if available.

Uhm... an approach like this can't as reliable as being "the final anwer
to update notifications", but IMHO can surely help.
More so if each package has /more/ than one address (frashmeat,
homepage, ftp) so that if some of the sources fail or change format, the
others are still up (a different page could show red lines in the ones
that failed to parse the last few days, something like that).

My approach to that would probably include PHP and a sqlite database.
If there is some interest in it I could develop and mantain it.

    Lapo