Re: Per-package updaters?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Efraim Flashner <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 01:29:15AM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Hello Guix!
>> 
>> Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:
>> 
>> > we have a couple of generic package updaters (CPAN, CRAN, Bioconductor,
>> > Github, GNU, etc), but they don’t nearly cover all of our packages.  I
>> > wonder if we should add one-off updaters for individual packages that
>> > don’t fall into any of the generic classes of updaters.
>> >
>> > Another question is how to implement them.  Would there be another
>> > optional field in package expressions containing a Guile script to run
>> > to determine updates for the current package?
>> >
>> > What are your opinions on this?
>> 
>> Currently we have ways to provide the generic updates with additional
>> hints.  For instance, we can provide hints to the ‘gnu’ updater:
>> 
>>   (define-public guile-next
>>     (package (inherit guile-2.0)
>>       (name "guile-next")
>>       ;; …
>>       (properties '((upstream-name . "guile")
>>                     (ftp-server . "alpha.gnu.org")
>>                     (ftp-directory . "/gnu/guile")))))
>> 
>> I suspect that one-off updaters would most likely use methods very
>> close to the existing updaters.  For instance, we could have a generic
>> FTP updater that would apply to all packages available on FTP; or we
>> could have a generic updater that crawls HTML pages for release numbers
>> and such things.  Then we would have optional properties in packages to
>> specify which method to use, or something along these lines.
>> 
>> WDYT?  Do you have examples in mind?
>> 
>
> Sourceforge has an rss feed for each project they host. For example, for
> libcddb: https://sourceforge.net/projects/libcddb/rss

Looks like something we could use in a generic SourceForge updater.

> Another example is Debian, which has a "watch file" that does something™,
> for example cairo's:
> https://sources.debian.net/src/cairo/1.14.8-1/debian/watch/

Yes, that’s pretty nice.

Ludo’.