New Port Version Check feature

[Edwin Groothuis]

After a long weekend of coding (long live the Queen!) this morning
I have sent out this morning the first batch of emails to alert
maintainers of possible availability of newer versions of the ports
they maintain.

The full overview of the first run can be found at
    http://edwin.adsl.barnet.com.au/~edwin/ports/

It works by replacing the current port version with "logical" next
versions: For foo-1.2.3 it tries foo-1.2.4, foo-1.3.0 and foo-2.0.0.

Possible ceavats:

- Some mastersites have been added to the ignore list. For example
  GForce websites have the habbit of returning a file which doesn't
  exist. And ftp://cr.yp.to/ has the habbit of being able to chdir
  to a file which doesn't exist, thus totally confusing LWP.

- Webservers which return the content-type text/* get ignored. Why?
  Because of too many false positives from websites which don't let
  their 404 handler return the 404 status code.

- It handles source/1.2.3/foo-1.2.3, but it doesn't handle
  source/1.2/foo-1.2.3 fully (thanks to tmclaugh@#bsdports for
  mentioning)

- Ports with version numbers in the name can give false positives:
  lang/gcc32, lang/gcc33 say that there is gcc-4.0.0 available
  (thanks to gerald@ for mentioning)


The following ideas are playing in my head with regarding to this:

- Fix mentioned problems above.

- Maintainers get an email only once per newly found file. This
  means that if url1/foo-1.2 gets found, it only alerts the maintainer
  once. Adding a new master-site (url2/foo-1.2) might give you
  another alert. Updating the portversion will give you alerts on
  all mastersites. But there won't be a weekly list of all previous
  alerts.

- Possible integration with portsmon or distfile survey.

- Full world domination, and a pony for everyone!
  (flatrate pizza possible where available)


Edwin

-- 
Edwin Groothuis      |            Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org
edwin at mavetju.org    |          Weblog: http://weblog.barnet.com.au/edwin/