Repology

As a maintainer at SlackBuilds.org, I try to keep my scripts updated. Normally, I would just go through the list of SlackBuilds that I maintain and check each project’s website for updates. It is time consuming and (worst) really boring. I recently came across a very useful website — Repology, the packaging hub.

As its description states, Repology monitors a huge number of package repositories and other sources comparing packages versions across them and gathering other information. Repology shows you in which repositories a given project is packaged, which version is the latest and which needs updating, who maintains the package, and other related information. Again, as stated on the website, it is useful for maintainers, helping to:

• Discover new releases of software you maintain packages for
• Find new projects to package
• Get in touch with fellow maintainers to improve packages together
• Keep package naming and versioning schemes in sync to other repos
• Fix problems detected by repology, such as broken links

This first point is what I find particularly useful. Searching myself as a maintainer, brings a page with information of what I maintain, where I can easily spot what packages are outdated:

Repology helped me identify projects that did not announce their latest release on the website or projects that had migrated to GitHub, without posting a notice.

Great!