Monitor upstream releases

Hi to all,
in your opinion what is the easiest way to track upstream releases in an automatic way?
maintainers what kind of system uses for their pkgs?

After our private discussion I saw that

Anyta is a project version monitoring system.

Every-day Anitya checks if there is a new version available and broadcast the new versions found via a message bus: fedmsg (More information on fedmsg for anitya).

Anyone with an OpenID account can register a new application on Anitya. To do so, all you need is the project name and its home page, the combination of both must be unique. In order to retrieve the new version, you can specify a backend for the project hosting. More information below.

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I think every distro has its way to track upstream new releases.
I found something related Fedora, Suse and Rosa.

It would be interesting to know what use our maintainers.

I am waiting for a response in IRC :wink:

What do Fedora, Suse, and Rosa use?

an answer, but not from our dev

joel_tess> Luca and I would like to know how you track upstream releases ? have you an automatic way ?
[18:34] joel_tess: there is a /usr/lib/rpm/perl script that can be used for tracking upstream releases. one does have to create the file that contains the upstream URL as well as write the patterns that match released tarballs
[18:35] the perl script is /usr/lib/rpm/vcheck, also contains doco.
[18:42] <joel_tess> thanks, can I publish your answer in forum here https://forum3.openmandriva.org/t/monitor-upstream-releases/451/3 ?
[18:49] joel_tess: sure. the script is rather ancient but works well if used with discipline
[18:50] <joel_tess> merci encore
[18:50] there is also a %track section in *.spec files ā€¦ the idea was to store %track stanzas with packages so that one could do a rpm -Va and be told when there were newer versions ā€œupstreamā€.
[18:51] never caught on because vendors took over updating from upstream
[18:52] <joel_tess> in real life you use it for omv ?
[18:52] all that %track doies is execute /usr/lib/rpm/vcheck with a blob of input. there is an example usage in the popt-1.14-1.src.rpm on the rpm5.org web site
[18:53] joel_tess: the script and functionality are in rpm5 used by omv. what omv uses is something else.
[18:53] ā† plfiorini (~plfiorini@sei.yacme.com) a quittĆ© ce serveur (Quit: Sto andando via).
[18:54] the script came from openpkg.org where it was used regularly
[18:55] <joel_tess> aha in fact your answer is very interesting , but I would like how breo,fedya etc do :slight_smile:
[18:56] rosa has this site (which is quite useful too) http://upstream.rosalinux.ru
[18:56] <joel_tess> yes I know it
[18:57] <joel_tess> and there is anitya too

for Rosa there is this site

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upstream_release_monitoring
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Upstream_Tracker
http://wiki.rosalab.com/en/index.php?title=Blog:ROSA_Planet/Mib-report_-_another_tool_to_help_maintainers&action=export2oo

At Rosa tracker page they have written:

Unfortunately, we cannot support the service anymore. Sorry for inconvenience.
The suitable replacement for this tool will be available at github.com/lvc soon.
ROSA Laboratory, 21 July 2015.

Thanks Luca. Thatā€™s interesting information.

Edit: So do we know what this distro is doing?

Hi Ben,
I just have not figured out, but sincerely I can live without it :wink:

Iā€™ve added %track statements to a couple of packages Iā€™m maintaining that Iā€™m not paying too close attention to, but for a majority of packages, itā€™s simply on the radar anyway because Iā€™m on the mailing lists for the projects. Also monitoring distrowatch.com for anything appearing out of date.

Some packages (such as anything related to KDE or LXQt) are always released at the same time, and we use scripts to update them at the same time (see GitHub - OpenMandrivaSoftware/kde-packaging-tools: Tools for auto-updating KDE packages ), so thereā€™s no need to track the individual packages there.

So itā€™s a mixed thingā€¦

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Thanks for the interesting information bero. Thatā€™s good to know.

:thinking:

Thanks to @Rugyada, I found very useful the mib-report program.
In OMV there is a very old version in 2013.0.
I suggest to download the Rosa version: mib-report-0.13-1-rosa2014.1.x86_64.

It compares package lists from most important distros and from upstream, providing a very nice html page with
latest version retrieved.

It can be executed also for single pkgs.

$ /usr/bin/mib-report --search plymouth
Searching for package plymouthā€¦
Rosa: 0.8.9
http://abf-downloads.rosalinux.ru/rosa2014.1/repository/SRPMS/main/release/plymouth-0.8.9-6.src.rpm
Cooker: 0.9.3
http://abf-downloads.rosalinux.ru/cooker/repository/SRPMS/main/release/plymouth-0.9.3-0.20160106.3.src.rpm
Mageia: 0.9.2
http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Mageia/distrib/cauldron/SRPMS/core/release/plymouth-0.9.2-4.mga6.src.rpm
Fedora: 0.9.3
http://mirror.yandex.ru/fedora/linux/development/rawhide/Everything/source/tree/Packages/p/plymouth-0.9.3-0.1.20160524.fc25.src.rpm
PCLinuxOS: 0.8.3
http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/pclinuxos/pclinuxos/srpms/SRPMS.pclos/plymouth-0.8.3-5pclos2012.src.rpm
Sisyphus: 0.8.8
http://mirror.yandex.ru/altlinux/Sisyphus/files/SRPMS/plymouth-0.8.8-alt6.git.37d2e4.src.rpm
OpenSUSE: 0.9.2
http://download.opensuse.org/source/tumbleweed/repo/oss/suse/src/plymouth-0.9.2-2.2.src.rpm.mirrorlist
PLD: 0.9.2
http://ftp.pld-linux.org/dists/3.0/PLD/SRPMS/RPMS/plymouth-0.9.2-2.src.rpm
Gentoo: 0.9.2
plymouth ā€“ Gentoo Packages
Debian: 0.9.2
Debian -- Package Search Results -- plymouth
Ubuntu: 0.9.2
Ubuntu ā€“ Package Search Results -- plymouth
Upstream Tracker: 0.9.2
Homepage URL:
Index of /software/plymouth/releases

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and/or for OpenMandriva 2014.2 this brand new build from @luca :wink:
https://abf.openmandriva.org/build_lists/63592

Build list - Project luca/mib-report - ABF has cooker urls updated