Subject: Re: [bug#53818] [PATCH 0/3] Add Repology updater

From: Nicolas Goaziou <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2022 15:29:23 +0100

Hello,

Xinglu Chen <[email-masked]> writes:

> The point of the Repology updater is to act as a fallback if none of
> the other updaters can update a package, e.g., ‘maven-dependency-tree’.
> I already mentioned that language-specific updaters usually provide more
> accurate and detailed information, so they should be used when possible;
> we aren’t losing anything here.

One issue is that such an updater will introduce frequent false
positives. It is common for Repology to get the latest release wrong,
because some distribution is doing fancy versioning, or because
different distributions disagree about what is upstream.

I don't think we can rely on Repology's "newest" status. The updater may
need to provide its own version comparison tool, because Repology's tool
and Guix versioning do not play nice, in particular when using
`git-version'.

Regards,
-- 
Nicolas Goaziou