Re: Proposal: Package status page.

[Jakob Sandgren <jakob@idefix.campus.luth.se>]

On Sat, Dec 12, 1998 at 10:34:07PM +0100, Martin Schulze wrote:
> 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].

I guess there are alternatives to Freshmeat that are better, searching
the LSM, using filewatcher.org....etc. The best way to do it is
offcourse to use a program that scans the primary site for new
packages. I think the problem with such a solution is that it is hard
to do in a reliable automatic way. 


> 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.

Agreed, the intent of this solution is to make life easier both for
the user and the maintainer. The maintainer has the option to get
information about new releases and a channel to the users where he can
inform them about his progress on the package. I did not thought about
letting the maintainer supply the information about the upstream
mainsite, maybe thats the way to do it. LSM has other advantages, if
the package move from one site to another, the url is updated. But
there are a lot of program that has no LSM entry.


> > 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.

Well, somethimes it's that little package that noone (normaly) cares
about that everyone is waiting on, because the last version had a
little nasty bug that affected a lot of other packages. I guess it's
hard to determine which packages you actually want information about.

Regards

Jakob Sandgren

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