¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Problem statement: You maintain packages for a Linux distribution, for example, Alpine Linux. Find a way to keep track of new software releases, to ensure your packages are kept up-to-date.

The Release Monitoring project (codename Anitya), part of the Fedora Linux distro, can accomplish that:

Watch for releases of your favorite projects

We all have our favorite projects and we all like to use their latest versions with their latest features. However, it is hard to keep in touch with all of them and be informed when they release a new version. Anitya can help!

We monitor upstream releases and broadcast them on Fedora messaging bus.

The underlying project:

Anitya is a release monitoring project.

Its goal is to regularly check if a project has made a new release. When Anitya discovers a new release for a project, it publishes a RabbitMQ message via fedora messaging. This makes it easy to integrate with Anitya and perform actions when a new release is created for a project. For example, the Fedora project runs a service called the-new-hotness which files a Bugzilla bug against a package when the upstream project makes a new release.

Anitya provides a user-friendly interface to add, edit, or browse projects.

Even though it is part of Fedora, we can use it for Alpine Linux just fine!

Recently I packaged zizmor. I noticed there was no entry for it in Anitya. I added one. It’s very straightforward:

• head to https://release-monitoring.org/
• ensure the project you want to monitor isn’t already present there
• log in (e.g. via GitHub)
• click add project

Fill in the form:

• Project name: zizmor
• Homepage: https://docs.zizmor.sh
• BackEnd: GitHub
• Version scheme: Semantic
• Github owner/project: zizmorcore/zizmor
• Version prefix: v
• Pre-release filter: rc
• Version filter: rc (excludes 1.8.0-rc0) and the like
• Check off “check releases instead of tags”

Once the project is created, add a new distribution mapping:

• Distribution: Alpine
• Package name: zizmor

And we’re done!

As per https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/flagging:

Package flagging

Manual package flagging has been disabled in favour of automatic flagging based on Anitya.

If you want a package to be up-to-date or to inform the maintainer about the package status, please feel free to create a package mapping on Anitya. Once the mapping is made, it should automatically send an email to the maintainer whenever a new version is available.

For details on how to create a project mapping for Alpine Linux, please refer to the release monitoring documentation.