At least two times in recent history, I’ve wondered “is this the most recent version” of some piece of software, immediately followed by “which distro has the most recent version?” As I recall, these were for:
I had discovered both to be woefully behind “most recent” for a number of distributions. In my mind popped a vision of a chart/table/matrix of software on one axis and distros on the other, showing which had what versions of things. And little boxes where I could rank the “bleeding-edgeness” of a distro.
While hunting around, I found something almost like my vision. The distrowatch website is pretty damn cool. It wasn’t really set up to compare bleeding-edgeness between different distros, just different versions of a distro. For example, here’s Ubuntu’s matrix.
I exchanged some email with the author, and it sounds like he just uses a mess of custom scripts to poll version numbers of some of the more “big-name” software packages, common to most distros. Needless to say, mdadm and f-spot did not make the cut. I’d love to be able to add more “tracked packages” via some kind of web UI. A URL plus a regex to extract a version from; almost the same as what’s needed for WWW-PkgFind to operate. :)
From the pkgfind man page description:
… scans a web or ftp site for newly posted files and
downloads them to a local filesystem. … The motivation for this script is to poll places where developers post patches to software we’re testing.
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.