Re: [Chicken-users] Arch User Repository packages

[Mario Domenech Goulart]

Hi Aaron,

On Fri, 09 Jan 2015 15:51:09 -0600 Aaron Paden <address@hidden> wrote:

> 1) Does chicken have a way to check if there are new versions of
> libraries? Most of these libraries don't actually have a website or
> up-to-date version information, and the only way I've seen so far to
> tell the latest version is to download it with chicken-install and check
> the version in the $name.setup file.

You can use something like

  $ curl -s 
'http://chicken.kitten-technologies.co.uk/henrietta.cgi?name=amb&listversions=1'
 

to get all versions for the given egg.

> 2) Is there a way to track dependencies for chicken packages? So far,
> the only way I've noticed is to install the package and check for
> errors. This is problematic for packages because I might have a
> dependency on my computer that another use does not. Some libraries
> document dependencies on their wiki page, but some don't.

There's no easy way to get that, as far as I can tell.  It's possible,
but there's nothing ready to use.  You can use henrietta-cache
(http://wiki.call-cc.org/egg/henrietta-cache) to fetch eggs' source, and
extract the meta data you need from there.

I'm working on a thing to make all that information available, but I
can't promise to make it available shortly.  Basically, I'm extending
the egg-tarballs egg to generate an index of eggs availble, with version
and dependencies information.  The output will be something like
http://paste.call-cc.org/paste?id=83a65ea7af41f50d99f8a8b12589bdad868a6a3e

The syntax is:

* The first line is the index format version

* the following lines have this format:
  (<egg> <version> <tarball size> <tarball SHA1 sum> <dependencies> <test 
dependencies>)

Since most of the time users install the latest available version of
eggs, there will be a shorter file with information about the latest
version of eggs only (~6x smaller).

Those indexes (full and latest-only) will be available via HTTP
(compressed, probably), so you will be able to download them and and get
the information you need.  The location of those files is still to be
determined.

The code to generate those indexes is in the "index" branch of
egg-tarballs: https://github.com/mario-goulart/egg-tarballs/tree/index

Best wishes.
Mario
-- 
http://parenteses.org/mario