By andyb on

Apologies if this is off topic for this forum, but it was either here or General Discussion, and here seemed more appropriate!

I have been using Drupal for a couple of years now. I love the ease of use, and the ability to plug in some of the fantastic modules that have been created to expand on the core functionality.

Something that I have never figured out, though, is whether there is an easy way to keep track of stable module releases and updates. I do manually check the module downloads pages regularly, but something more automated would be much easier to deal with.

I have looked around and, for the life of me, cannot find anything like a RSS feed for the modules downloads page.

Does anybody have any suggestions?

Thanks!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

dww’s picture

dww
we/he/they
commented

i agree this would be useful. especially since module releases don't have real version numbers, it can be a pain to keep track of everything...

there was a recent thread started on the development email list regarding something like this. the maintainer for the System Info module wants to add support for an "up-to-date" function to check if a given drupal installation has all the most recent versions of any installed modules, etc. you could help make that happen if you're interested (test a beta version, suggest improvements, supply patches, whatever you're able to do).

enjoy,
-derek

___________________
3281d Consulting

SeanK’s picture

SeanK commented

It would be a nice addition to know when something new has been committed to a module's CVS. Something like the extensions window in Firefox that lets you know when an update is available.

I'd be willing to try and help on a module, or module upgrade to do something like that.

Currently, ViewCVS is implemented on this site. Upon review, I noted thread http://viewvc.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=179 which referenced that the dev version has some form of RSS in it.

That's one posibility.

Another is to figure out how to identify which version and release of a module you have installed, and allow the server to check against the drupal CVS for updates. This could either be automated, or by request.

What about if your site could email you when an installed module had a release/patch committed?

Interesting thoughts?

yktdan’s picture

yktdan commented

We are currently in a transition from 4.6 to 4.7 and some contrib modules have been updated and some not. In general you cannot tell from the info whether they work on 4.7 or not without trying them. See http://drupal.org/node/50840 for my attempt at sorting out some of this. Once most work on 4.7, those still on 4.6 will have a hard time figuring out which version was the last one to work on 4.6.

Walt Daniels

ckclarke’s picture

ckclarke commented

Some of the modules have preamble/descriptions that have been updated recently but then when you try a cvs install, it doesn't work - and it's hard to determine whether it's something you've done or whether the module just isn't ready for prime time yet.

Some sort of Firefox Extensions type updater would be excellent - it would be especially useful for those of use with a site that uses a larger number of modules.

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john.money’s picture

john.money commented

I have started writing something like this for my own site maintenance needs to answer the age old question, which version of which module am I using on which site? You can see the first cut of this code here:

http://drupal.org/node/46834

One drawback of my approach (parsing the first few lines and looking for the CVS identifier) is that not all files have this identifier. A more direct approach would be versioning built into the updater code.

My next step will be to parse the CVS log messages here:

http://drupal.org/cvs?rss=true

andyb’s picture

andyb commented

Thanks to everyone for the feedback and suggestions.

The System Info module looks interesting. I am going to try keeping an eye on the development RSS feed as well.

What prompted me to post was that I have been looking at Typo3 as a possible solution for a project that I am involved in. A big win for Typo3 is the way that it handles the installation of extensions (modules in Drupal speak).

The Typo3 admin page has an Extensions Manager. This can connect to a central repository to get updates for extensions and apply them to your local installation. It's like CPAN for Typo3, all handled within the application.

Similar to the work that Gestaltware is doing, I have been toying with the idea of automating something that inspects the CVS $Id tags in .module files.

Right now though I can't think of a sane way of doing this without wasting a lot of bandwidth. I guess that you would need to download the current stable .tar.gz file and dig out the .module file to inspect it. Probably not the best way, but right now that's the only way that I can see that something like this would work right now.