livecheck

[Rainer Müller]

On 2009-07-23 21:43 , Scott Haneda wrote:
> His concern was that of course, it downloads the entire page, and uses  
> regex to parse out the important bits.  He was willing to create a  
> current-version.txt file that he maintains, as he was worried about  
> bandwidth.

> I see this as a semi valid concern.  But I also do not see it as a lot  
> different than a user going to a Web site and manually checking the  
> version in a browser.

Traffic for livecheck is even lower than checking by hand with a browser
as it does not load images, stylesheets and other data referenced from
the site. General speaking, it should be low traffic compared to regular
users.

If he is really concerned, MacPorts sends the User-Agent header in the
form "MacPorts $mpversion libcurl/$curlversion". So if he likes he can
check his logs how much traffic is accounted for that on the homepage
URL (without counting distfiles).

> What are fellow port developers opinions on this matter?  I am not  
> aware of any scheduled and routine hits that live check is going to  
> make, it is a on user demand feature.

No, there is no scheduled livecheck for all ports. Maintainers may have
set that up for their own ports, but that's not something we control.
Also any user could run livecheck to see if MacPorts is still at the
latest version for this port.

Rainer