Package Version Tracking Gains New Capabilities

Since we last tackled Version Tracking, we’ve been exploring several ways to enhance the feature. We implemented several improvements, including notifications about a new version (upstream) being available and user documentation, with even more coming over the next two weeks. Let’s dive into what’s live today.

These updates are part of the Foster Collaboration beta program. You can find more information about the beta program here.

Our efforts to foster collaboration started in August 2024, when we introduced labels and bug report links. Next, we improved labels to foster collaboration, allowed labeling projects and introduced the functionality of managing labels with the API. Building on that, we introduced Assignments. Recently, we’ve introduced package version tracking based on the Release Monitoring which has been enhanced with the Package Version Information. Then label-based filtering and automatic unassignments when a request is accepted. Now Package Version Tracking gained new capabilities like upstream release notifications and user documentation.

User Documentation for Version Tracking

Package Version Tracking is now covered in the Open Build Service User Documentation. This will help new users get up to speed with the feature more quickly.

Filtering Packages by Version State

You can now quickly filter packages by version state: up-to-date, new version available, or no upstream set. This provides an immediate snapshot of your project’s overall health and maintenance needs.

Notifications on New Upstream Releases

Last but not least, you can now subscribe to receive notifications whenever a new update is available for a package you maintain. If the project (with the Anitya Distribution Name set) contains any devel packages, the maintainers of those development packages will be notified instead. We hope this makes staying on top of updates even easier.

How To Give Us Feedback

There are two ways to reach us:

• On GitHub, by opening an issue and / or commenting on an already opened issue.
• On IRC, by talking directly to us. We are in the channel #opensuse-buildservice on Libera.Chat.

Please note that we favor GitHub to gather feedback as it allows us to easily keep track of the discussions.