[Buildroot] Package informations, online and updated

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Le Thu, 2 Aug 2012 15:19:15 +0100,
Alex Bradbury <asb@asbradbury.org> a ?crit :

> It would be handy to add the current version for each package. More
> ambitiously, a variable defining a watch[1] line could be added to
> each Makefile, and used with the Debian scripts (such as uscan) to
> automatically detect new upstream versions.

Agreed. Funnily I was almost to the point of talking about this in my
announcement e-mail :-)

How exactly are those watch lines used? I.e, which tool is capable of
parsing them, and doing the necessary http/ftp requests to figure out
if a newer upstream version is available?

That said, showing the version of each package will slow down the
script quite a bit. For now, the script simply greps/seds through
the .mk file, which is reasonably fast. However, knowing the version
number is more complicated because sometimes the version number is
computed from other variables:

FOO_MAJOR_VERSION = 2
FOO_VERSION = $(FOO_MAJOR_VERSION).3

So to handle this properly, I would have to do 'make
<pkg>-show-version' for each package, which would be very slow
(but doable).

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons
Kernel, drivers, real-time and embedded Linux
development, consulting, training and support.
http://free-electrons.com