bleeding-edgeness matrix
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.
