Automate dependency page

[fsimonis]

Repology provides an unstable API and database dumps for its data:

https://repology.org/api/v1
https://dumps.repology.org/README.txt

We could use this to fetch the versions of the dependencies for the Ubuntu baseline and keep the dependency section updated.

[fsimonis]

Problem: the database dumps are enormous, and the API is heavily rate-limited.

[fsimonis]

pkgs.org offers API access for Gold supporters at https://pkgs.org/premium/

Gold Membership
€4.50 / month (plus VAT)

I asked if they would provide a reduced plan for super low API usage.

[MakisH]

I now added repology badges/links to each dependency in #618, mostly as a convenience for us. You also added a repology overview for preCICE in the system packages page in #620.

Given that automation here might be complicated for little benefit, what should we still do?

We change the baseline so rarely and we define the requirements in various places, that I think we should rather manually check every time.

[fsimonis]

Given that automation here might be complicated for little benefit, what should we still do?

I would still create a script that pulls the latest package version of the last 2 lts and creates a data file we can refer to on the website.

This we should then add to the website section of the release PR.

We change the baseline so rarely and we define the requirements in various places, that I think we should rather manually check every time.

Time has shown that we often forget to update baseline information or worse, partially update the dependencies leading to an inconsistent state.

Also having this as a one click solution means that we can update this reliably on release, something that to my knowledge never happened.

[Aayushman-nvm]

I’ve submitted a fix for this issue in PR #824. I’d appreciate it if you could review it when you have time.
Thank you.