Re: Proposal: Package status page.

[Martin Schulze <joey@carelia.infodrom.north.de>]

Jakob Sandgren wrote:
> After reading the thread about "lilo 21-1" and all the messages about
> "when will XFree86-3.3.3 be availiable" I thought that a status page
> about package "completion" would be nice. I think it can be done in a
> very autmatic way;
> 
> 1. A program scans (freshmeat?) for a new upstream release, when a new
>    release is availiable, a message is sent to the maintainer.

Freshmeat is only one source of information wrt this issue.  I like this
idea.  In fact, I'm already using such a mechanim[1] in order to provide
the GtkBuffet[2].

However I don't like to flood maintainer in general.  Each maintainer
should be able to subscribe with a specific address and a specific package
(or regexp) and eventually also a URL to be informed about new versions.

> 2. The maintainer replys to the message with ETA or some other
>    information (maybe this release should not become a .deb for some
>    reason). 

This could be automated.  However for 90% of the packages this information
is less than useful.  E.g. who is interested that libfoo-bar-perl v$(deb)+1
is out and will be available in a few days.  Nonetheless it is very useful
for some major packages like X, gcc, egcs, libc, perl, python etc.

Regards,

	Joey

[1] ftp://ftp.infodrom.north.de/pub/people/joey/tools/sentinel

[2] ftp://ftp.infodrom.north.de/pub/unix/gtkbuffet/

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