A few months ago, I wrote a small script for myself (called “portwatch-sf”) to keep informed about my SourceForge.net ports’ updates. It runs on the freefall, and it checks my SF.net ports every week and send me an e-mail when there is an update. It is like the great portscout service, but it works only for SF.net project.

Here is one-liner for a specific port (e.g. devel/cppcheck, C Shell syntax):

setenv PORTNAME cppcheck; setenv SFGID `fetch -q -o – “http://sf.net/projects/$PORTNAME” | grep “showfiles.php?” | head -1 | sed -e ’s|^\(.*\)?group_id=||g’ | cut -d ‘#’ -f1` ; fetch -q -o – “http://sf.net/export/rss2_projfiles.php?group_id=$SFGID” | grep “released” | head -1 | cut -d ‘ ‘ -f2

In my opinion, the main advantage of this approach that one can always get the exact version of the given software, no other heuristics needed. And it is also very compact I am very curious about whether others have the same opinion. Anyway, it works for me perfectly for months.

:g