From: Bruce Williams <bruce@...>
Date: 2003-03-12T19:05:33+09:00
Subject: Gentoo Administration

This isn't really worth an [ANN], so I'm not making it one.

I know that a certain amount of interest has come up in this group for 
Ruby-based system administration.  

This is of concern to me as well, and since I know that several people on this 
list use Gentoo Linux (as do I), I make the following small offering.

http://blog.codedbliss.com/archives/gentoo-check_updates-0.5b.rb

What I've come up with is a small cron script that will update rsync and then 
e-mail you a listing of any updated packages that are available (via a parsed 
emerge -u world --pretend), to include descriptions, links to package 
homepages, and versioning. You can set this up for whatever interval you 
like-- I chose to throw it in /etc/cron.weekly.

This script requires YAML4R (http://yaml4r.sf.net), as YAML is the output 
format.  Why? Because Gentoo + Ruby + YAML rocks.

Cheers,

// Bruce

PS: In the event this is actually useful to anyone but myself, I may package 
this with a few other Gentoo admin scripts for the RAA.  Comments welcome.

---
author: Bruce R. Williams 
url: http://codedbliss.com
irc: { nick: iusris, channels: [ ruby-lang, yaml ], server: irc.freenode.net }
quote: >
  It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate,
  tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.'
  -- Samuel Adams