This represents a milestone release over the previous version, and
includes significant improvements to the version detection and
comparison algorithms, support for the new SourceForge mirror layout
(and an easy way to add future workarounds), theoretical support for
NetBSD's pkgsrc and OpenBSD ports, support for providing a list of
software in an XML file in place of ports, and support for SQLite.
Of course, there are also many optimisations and general bug fixes.
FreeBSD ports tree, and potentially other software repositories.
Various factors make this task a bit more difficult than it might
initially seem. In particular, the array of weird and wonderful
versioning schemes software vendors manage to come up with.
portscout spawns several child processes and does its version checking
in parallel, while attempting to best-guess strange-looking version
numbers, navigate around unhelpful sites and web servers, and contend
with the CPU-heavy rapidly-expanding FreeBSD ports system.
In addition to all this, it is possible to generate nice HTML reports
and send reminder mails to interested parties.
This should probably be considered beta until v1.0 is released.
