How to subscribe to updates of a specific package?

Question

I'd like to recieve some sort of notification when a new version of nss-pam-ldapd package is available on the archive.ubuntu.com repository.

Is there an email list or any other tool of this sort I can subscribe to?

Answer 1

You can setup special software on your machine or in your browser.

• Use SiteDelta Watch addon in Firefox. It scans page or its region for changes and show notification if interesting area of page was changed. You need to do the following:

  1. install this addon from addons.mozilla.org
  2. open needed page https://packages.ubuntu.com/source/bionic/nss-pam-ldapd in Firefox

  3. click SiteDelta Watch button on Firefox toolbar and click Monitor

     

  4. Then click on down arrow to open right sidebar

     

  5. Click Add new and select paragraph with version number

     

  6. That is all, SiteDelta Watch will inform you on page change.

• Other method is to set up local python watcher - urlwatch:

  1. Install it

     sudo apt install python3-pip python3-keyring
     pip3 install urlwatch --user
     pip3 uninstall keyring
     

  2. Set it up according to recommendations from official GitHub page - create file ~/.config/urlwatch/urls.yaml with contents:

     name: "APT package watch"
     url: "https://packages.ubuntu.com/source/bionic/nss-pam-ldapd"
     filter:
       - xpath: '//*[@id="content"]/h1'
       - html2text: re
     

     Note: in code above xpath: '//*[@id="content"]/h1' refers to the h1 header element with text Source Package: nss-pam-ldapd (0.9.9-1) [universe] (as in SiteDelta method).

  3. Run urlwatch first time manually and create crontab job for it. SMTP notifying is supported too.

Personally I use both - SiteDelta and URLWatch.