Question

I’m writing a git-install.sh script:
http://gist.github.com/419201

To get Git’s latest stable release version number, I do:

LSR_NUM=$(curl -silent http://git-scm.com/ | sed -n '/id="ver"/ s/.*v\([0-9].*\)<.*/\1/p')

2 Questions:

1. Refactor my code: Is there a better way programmatically to do this?

2. This works now, but it’s brittle: if
   the web page at http://git-scm.com/
   changes, the line above may stop
   working.

   PHP has a reliable URL for getting
   the latest release version:
   Is there a site which simply outputs the latest stable version numbers of php and mysql?

   Is there something like this for
   Git? This comes close: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/

Answer 1

I’d just do this:

git ls-remote --tags git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git | ...

The location of the public repository is pretty much guaranteed to stay fixed, so I wouldn’t really consider it brittle. The output of git-ls-remote will pretty definitely not change either.

The version number should be the last tag; you could grab it with something like this:

git ls-remote ... | tail -n 1 | sed 's@.*refs/tags/\(.*\)\^{}@\1@'