Mib-report - another tool to help maintainers

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For tha last several months, we have actively used Updates Builder to update packages in our repositories. The tool works quite well and the number of packages updated by means of it during a month sometimes exceeds several hundreds. But the real life showed that one of the major weaknesses of such automated updates is not the tools themselves, but the data provided to them. The thing is that Updates Builder builds new packages on the basis of data provided by Upstream Tracker. The latter monitors upstream sites using URLs provided in spec files of RPM packages. However, these URLs are sometimes absent and even if they are present, they can be out of date (no wonder, since this information is rarely interesting for users, neither it is used in ABF, so maintainers often forget to update it). As a result, the number of "Available in Upstream" empty cells at ROSA Updates Tracker page is rather big.

But besides upstream monitoring, one can take a look at repositories of other distributions. And in this area a tool named mib-report can help. The tool was originally developed by our friends from Mandriva International Backports group. Its aim is to compare versions of packages in development repositories of ten Linux distributions:

  • Rosa Desktop Fresh
  • OpenMandriva Cooker
  • Mageia Cauldron
  • PCLinuxOS
  • OpenSUSE Factory
  • Alt Linux Sisyphus
  • Fedora Rawhide (with RpmFusion)
  • Gentoo
  • Debian
  • Ubuntu

MIB-report not only compares package versions, but for RPM-based distributions provides URLs to Source RPM packages:

$ mib-report --search firefox
Searching for package firefox...
Rosa: 25.0
http://abf-downloads.rosalinux.ru/rosa2012.1/repository/SRPMS/main/updates/firefox-25.0-1.src.rpm
Cooker: 25.0.1
http://abf-downloads.rosalinux.ru/cooker/repository/SRPMS/main/release/firefox-25.0.1-1.src.rpm
Mageia: 24.1.0
http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Mageia/distrib/cauldron/SRPMS/core/release/firefox-24.1.0-1.mga4.src.rpm
Fedora: 25.0
http://mirror.yandex.ru/fedora/linux/development/rawhide/source/SRPMS/f/firefox-25.0-3.fc21.src.rpm
PCLinuxOS: 25.0
http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/pclinuxos/pclinuxos/srpms/SRPMS.pclos/firefox-25.0-1pclos2013.src.rpm
Sisyphus: 25.0
http://mirror.yandex.ru/altlinux/Sisyphus/files/SRPMS/firefox-25.0-alt1.src.rpm
Gentoo: 25.0
http://packages.gentoo.org/package/firefox
Ubuntu: 25.0
http://packages.ubuntu.com/firefox
Homepage URL:
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

And inside SRPM package one can find a tarball with source code! So even if we can't automatically detect the freshest software version in upstream, we can take a look at versions available in other distributions. And if for some package their version is newer than ours, then we can take SRPM package and extract tarball with source code from it (in addition, it can make sense to updated URL field in our package).

Such a feature is currently been implemented in Updates Builder launchers - now they will take into account not only data from Upstream Tracker, but also information from mib-report. We would like to note that we only extract source tarballs from SRPMs taken from other distributions, but not the patches (since it is hard to understand without human help if a patch is relevant for ROSA or not) and not spec files (since we believe that our spec files are one of the simplest and clearest among RPM-based systems, and there is no need to overload them with tons of unnecessary constructions used in many other distributions).

In general, if to update a package we should just rebuild it using new upstream tarball, then why not to give this task to automated scripts? For human beings, we can find more interesting tasks that will be more useful for upstream developers and distribution users. Finally, we believe that upstream developers are more interested in patches and improvements from distribution maintainers, and not in contests devoted to the speed of detection of new upstream releases.

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