[Buildroot] Bumping packages: some comments/suggestions

[Jerzy Grzegorek <jerzy.grzegorek@trzebnica.net>]

Hi Thomas,


> 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!

Thanks for your suggestions.
Do you mean something like this ?

Package name        Current version       New upstream releases Reverse 
dependencies
======================================================================================= 

...
apr ............... 1.4.6 ........................................ 
apr-util log4cxx
apr ..................................... 1.4.8
apr-util .......... 1.4.1
apr-util ................................ 1.5.1
apr-util ................................ 1.5.2
...

Regards,
Jerzy


> Best regards,
>
> Thomas