Google Summer of Code/2012/Ideas/Ebuild Upstream Scanner

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Ebuild Upstream Scanner

euscan (Ebuild Upstream Scanner) is an utility to check if an ebuild have new upstream version. It was designed to provide the same features as debian's uscan and DEHS (http://dehs.alioth.debian.org/). euscan is also a web interface that aggregates the result of euscan ran on all gentoo ebuilds (currently hosted at http://euscan.iksaif.net but will move to gentoo.org someday). There are a lot of things to do on euscan, here are some examples:

Celery port

Currently euscan use shell scripts and GNU parallel to scan the portage tree. Using celery (a python task queue that integrates well with django) would allow a more flexible scan process. Scanning the tree or a package could be done with a simple django command starting a celery task, the web interface could rescan old packages on-demand too. While adding celery commands, it would be great to add simple commands to: create the local filesytem needed by euscan, add/sync/remove an overlay, etc... Celery is not really packaged for gentoo, but I got some ebuilds in my overlay, so another side of the project could be to push them to the portage tree.

Version Detection Enhancements

euscan currently use multiple heuristics to determine upstream version, but there is a lot to do to enhance that to remove false positive and be able to scan more package:

  • create a script to gather statistics on euscan success and failure and use methods.
  • use metadata.xml's <upstream><remote-id> tag with the appropriate euscan site-handler (pypi, pearl, cpan, etc...) and make sure that all packages have this tag correctly set in the portage tree
  • create a new metadata tag <upstream><watch> that works like debian/watch and make euscan use it. Create a script to import informations from the associated debian/watch file.
  • steal ideas from other tools (uscan, portscout) and use other source of data (youri, distrowatch, distromatch, whoas; Equivalent-Packages)

Euscan Web enhancements

Add an account system, and allow maintainer to register to subscribe to automatic weekly notifications. Integrate euscan with other webapps like http://portage.gentoo.org, http://znurt.org/, http://gpo.zugaina.org/, Gentoostats and try to create a single killer webapp . Add better overlay support and tweak django administration.


Contacts Required Skills
  • Python
  • Git
  • Portage
  • Django
  • Shell (optional)
  • Celery (optional)
  • HTML/CSS/JS (optional)


Mailing List Archives

Ebuild Upstream Scanner - Mailing List Archives