On Jan 22, 2008, at 10:28, Matt Scilipoti wrote:
Regarding the versioning, when the authors of ncbi_tools update their package, the replace the current tarball on their ftp site with the new one and there is no version number in the filename or path, so the only (easiest?) way to know that its updated is to download it and checksum it. If I was a good port maintainer I would check my ports periodically and submit updates before anyone else, like you, discovers that they're broken :)
I would be happy to help you create an automatic notifier. I have a few tools that notify me when http pages change. Unfortunately, I don't have anything for ftp pages and I don't see a page at ncbi that will be updated when a new ncbi.tar.gz is created. Do you know of an http page? If not, I'm sure I can create something.
MacPorts already includes a feature called livecheck, which maintainers are encouraged to set up and use in order to discover when ports they maintain need to be updated.