Using release-monitoring.org [was: uscan roadmap]
On Thu, Dec 2, 2021 at 12:51 AM Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> wrote:
>
> It might be a idea to look at how other distributions do checking for
> new upstream releases and adopt some of their improvements.
>
> I note Fedora uses a service (that isn't Fedora specific) for this:
>
> https://release-monitoring.org
> https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/package-maintainers/Upstream_Release_Monitoring/
I think this would be the best path forward - it would probably be not
easy given that it changes entirely how the current system works, but
it might be well worth the effort. Working together with another
distribution would share the work for the distro. I'm sure if we are
willing to join them they would accommodate us if there are any
changes we would require (e.g. login via salsa instead of a fedora
account).
> Another idea would be to use the Repology service to notice when other
> distros include a newer version of a package than Debian does.
>
> https://repology.org/
This however I think is not a good idea. Repology is very nice to
check what versions other distros have, but for projects that don't
have any external language-specific package repository like e.g.
python, it would mean that we could easily miss a new release (think
small projects written in C that are not in any other distro) and
wrongly formatted version from other distros would impact us
(unlikely, but still bad in theory).
And since it requires the same infrastructure changes as going with
release-monitoring.org, it would be better to just use that.
> I also wonder if it is time to split debian/watch out of Debian source
> packages, since upstream download locations generally change
> independently of the Debian package and so information about upstream
> download locations probably should be maintained independently.
Yes that makes sense, what I wonder is how much change is needed for
putting watch files in a separate repo compared to going with
release-monitoring.org (I don't know enough about the inner workings
of our tools to answer this question).
Anyway, if using release-monitoring.org is too much work or nobody is
willing to do it, I like the proposals for version 5 so far.
Regards,
Stephan
Reply to: