"Outdated since" on the pacakges.msys2 webpage?

[goyalyashpal]

It is website side continuation of "out-of-date" packages #3536

Current Situation:

Update Date	Base Package	Repo Version		New Version

This webpage currently has 4 fields: Where the "Update Date" seems to be the date of the release of new version in the reference repo (arch/cygwin)!

Painpoint/Problem:

Problem is that:

• It is not easy to see how behind an msys2 package is out of date from up the "reference" repo.
• As in, if a package is frequently updated in ref repo, but not in msys2; there's only version number to look out for that.
• But version schemes, often don't give a clear idea of the answer to the question either.

Solution direction proposed:

Having some additional metric for outdature - preferably date based - will help a lot.

• ... so, a field of "Outdated since" which will essentially show the "oldest update date" after the version on msys2.
• This can help with seeing for how far behind a package is from the update - in general case.

Implementation details:

Solution 1

• The simplest correct way: just store the first record of "Updated Date" after the package is updated on msys2 as this "Outdated since".
• The assumption here will be that when the package is updated on the msys2, it will be updated to the latest one available - hence, resetting the "Outdated since" to some sentinel value indicating that it's updated.

If that's not the case, that is, if there are cases for when a msys2 package is updated to some already older version due to some constrain, this proposal WON'T work.

Do msys2 has such cases?

Solution 2

Another more robust, but also probably more manually involved solution can be:

• to have a record in backend for a package, for every update available for it on reference repo.
• Then once that package updates on msys2, then removing off all the records older than the version updated to.
• The website will show the latest date in the record (which it already does), and the oldest one.

The solution will give best outcome as long as msys2 updates only to the some "tagged" releases and not just the upstream repo head or random commits.

Hack 3

The even simplest way - though not realy a solution - can be to show the date on which the package was last updated on msys2. The problem is that it's plain wrong as it doesn't give any idea of the question - "how far behind" a package is.

[goyalyashpal]

there are cases for when a msys2 package is updated to some already older version due to some constrain

yes, the latest one being blender updated from blender v2.93.14 to blender v3.2.2-2 via msys2/MINGW-packages#16285 with the latest one still being blender v3.4.1

[goyalyashpal]

The website repology (found from helix-editor's download page) seems to be nice for these things, it compares stuff with other repositories.

• MSYS2 mingw
• MSYS2 msys2

It also has filters for problematic/vulnerable etc; the legend at the bottom is super duper nice thing as well

.