On Wednesday, October 1, 2003, at 06:26  AM, Frederick Bruckman wrote:

>> 	$ cd ...../category/package
>> 	$ make show-var VARNAME=PKGVERSION
>
> Forking all those make's is terribly slow. It would be fine by me if
> we were to insist on putting the package version near the top in plain
> English.

   I don't think this is such a good idea.  We have cases where
a number of packages share the same version (e.g. through a
Makefile.common) or where a package might be available in
different versions for different platforms (think Netscape).

   If parsing makefiles is too complicated for getting package
versions, an alternative is to do a 'make readme' first.  The
resulting README.html should be easy to parse for a perl script.

   Cheers
       ,
    Rene