Waiting for a package to be available in an archive

[Adrien Nader]

Hi,

After some discussions a few months ago and some more last week, I wrote
a quick script during the week-end to be able to wait until a package is
updated in a PPA so that I could do automatically trigger tests.

The script is available at https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/3747331

As I note in the link above, this uses two libraries that are not
packaged and is therefore not as friendly to install as I had hoped.
It's also written in OCaml (which makes sense as I'll reuse everything
for my project of an updated excuses page).

I expect that at least a few people have taken offense reading the
above due to the use of OCaml and will write the same in another
language, with more polish!

For such a rewrite, you should look at the fetch function: it's mostly
API calls to curl in order to avoid re-downloading the Packages.gz file
when it hasn't changed (on a PPA with only three packages, HTTP time is
cut from 150ms to 70ms IIRC; expect the 150ms to become a lot more on a
larger archive, and to also be heavier for servers).

Are you still wondering if you should rewrite in your preferred and
superior programming language? It's just another proof that it's
actually inferior to OCaml since for the past 20 years or more, there
haven't been an implementation of this frequent task in that language,
and there still isn't.

PS: I'm available to discuss implementation details more.
PPS: this email is meant to fit in the ideas of
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Law and
  https://xkcd.com/386/

-- 
Adrien