How to be notified when a new stable version is released?

[vmassol]

Hi there,

On the XWiki open source project, we use the LO stable version as a dependency. We would like to know if there’s a way for us to find out whenever a new stable version was released, something that we can automate. Right now, we have to remember to regularly visit Download LibreOffice | LibreOffice - Free Office Suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft or Release Notes | LibreOffice - Free Office Suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft (BTW as of now the later mentions 7.5.6 as the latest stable while the former says 7.5.7 ;)).

Thank you very much!

[mikekaganski]

Which OS do you use?
On Windows, the default MSI installer gives you a version that by default performs checks itself (unless you disable that during installation, or in settings). It will show you a notification when the new release is advertised by the TDF server (typically about two weeks after the official release; the timeout is designed to reduce the load on TDF servers). If you use a version from app stores, they will update themselves automatically, without your intervention - as soon as the update is published to the stores. If you are on a Linux, you would typically use some distro-packaged version, which update policy is defined by respective distros / maintainers. If you use a TDF release installed manually, the same automatic notification should trigger, that is discussed for Windows.

[ajlittoz]

Please retag your question common because base flags questions relation to database interface component.

[vmassol]

Thanks but my question is on being notified outside of LO itself, just to know when when a new stable version has been released. We need to include this in our build process.

[mikekaganski]

Huh, but how could you do that? Upgrading a dependency must be a manual process, not something that automatically breaks your (user’s) build process when you don’t expect that? The automatic dependency upgrades was the issue that created controversy in javascript world ~lately (when someone had intentionally updated their package with something bad, to demonstrate that), and luckily, we are not part of that problem.

[vmassol]

It won’t be automated but we need to know when a new stable release has been made to update the dependency. Thx

[mikekaganski]

Please describe your expected workflow - would the build process check something on the server, and produce a warning at build / configure time? I guess, it is already possible - there is a protocol used in LibreOffice autoupdater for that, which is likely suitable for that.

[vmassol]

The process is:

• The person responsible for the XWiki build gets notified that there’s a new stable release of LO (by email for example)
• He/she updates the XWiki build to update the LO dependency version

Right now the process is:

• The person responsible for the XWiki build has to check regularly the LO download page to see if there’s a new stable release.
• He/she updates the XWiki build to update the LO dependency version

With the current process, we regularly miss new stable releases by several days (and this causes some problems but it’s outside the scope of this thread).

Thanks!

[mikekaganski]

LibreOffice official blog, which publishes release notifications, has an RSS feed - would it fit the case?

[vmassol]

Just checked, and it requires some visual parsing of the RSS feed (since it’s not just about stable releases announcements). It’s better than nothing but not as nice as the ability to get that specific information directly (with a github release notification for example, see Getting notified on the latest releases of your day-to-day tech stack, or with some tools like the renovate bot or the dependabot, or with web site services where you can register to received notifications when a software has made some releases).

Is there some file somewhere (maybe in your source directory), that we could poll automatically and that contains the stable version number? We could scrape Download LibreOffice | LibreOffice - Free Office Suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft I guess but that’s quite ugly since the HTML can get at any time. Some more semantic would be nicer

Thanks

[Regina]

You could subribe to mailto:announce@documentfoundation.org , see mailing-lists. The list is used to announce new releases and some other important things. Look at its archive to see what kind of mails the list is used for.

[vmassol]

Thanks for the idea. It’s not perfect (contains way more info than the one I need) but I understand that there’s no current other way to be notified by mail when a new stable version is released. Too bad.

Thanks!