[Buildroot] Bumping packages: some comments/suggestions

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

Hello Jerzy and Axel,

Recently, both of you have worked on and contributed a number of
patches bumping a significant number of Buildroot packages. This is of
course really great, and I'd like to thank you for those contributions.

That being said, I would have two suggestions:

 *) It would be great if you could check that the reverse dependencies
    of the package you're bumping still continue to build. For example,
    Axel bumped 'ortp', but didn't realize bumping it would break
    the linphone and mediastreamer. While we certainly cannot expect
    contributors to test package bumps in all possible configurations
    (especially for packages having a large number of
    reverse dependencies), checking at least a few of them is a good
    idea. Also, when bumping from one major release to another (such as
    berkeleydb 5.x to berkeleydb 6.x), even more care should be taken.

 *) To make this "bumping" effort a bit more systematic, I believe it
    would be useful to introduce an infrastructure in Buildroot to
    automatically check if upstream has a new package. In many cases,
    the upstream site has a directory with all the different versions
    of the tarball, so checking if there's a newer one in an automated
    way would be possible. If we do this for many packages, then we can
    run a script every day, and check if there are new upstream
    releases available. Debian has such a mechanism with the 'watch'
    mechanism (see https://wiki.debian.org/debian/watch/). Gentoo has
    the euscan utility (see https://github.com/iksaif/euscan). It would
    be nice having something like this, that we could integrate in the
    Buildroot per-package stats at
    http://autobuild.buildroot.org/stats/ to get a clear vision of
    which packages need to be upgraded. If one of you is interested in
    doing this, it'd be great!

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com