Proposal: generic debian/watch

[kapouer]

Here's the one from npm package i use :

./debian/watch :

version=3
opts=downloadurlmangle=s/.*v(.*)/http\:\/\/registry\.npmjs\.org\/npm\/-\/xxxxxx\-$1\.tgz/,\
filenamemangle=s/.*v(.*)$/xxxxxx-$1\.tar\.gz/ \
https://github.com/toto/xxxxxx/tags .*/tarball/v([\d.-]+)

You can see it checks new version on github (because i do not know how to find new version on npm website),
and the github link could be found in the "repository.url" of package.json.
The download link is simply the one from npm website, to ensure the published npm package is used, not the github
version (they can differ sometimes).

[arikon]

You could use npm show <package> to get the last version from npm registry

[kapouer]

But you can't do that in debian/watch

[arikon]

We also can't look for tags on github.com for every package: not all packages are hosted on github and not all repos are tagged.

[kapouer]

That was only a suggestion, if you think it's not possible to produce some convenient working debian/watch, don't do it.
Maybe in general it's not possible, but maybe also 95% of packages could be supported ?