There are a couple of reports (1 and 2) about anitya not doing its job properly for projects hosted on sourceforge.net.

So here is a summary of the situation:

A project X on sourceforge.net, for example with a homepage sourceforge.net/projects/X, releases multiples tarball named, X-1.2.tar.gz, libX-0.3.tar.gz and libY-2.0.tar.gz.

So how to model this.

The original approach taken was: the project is named X, so in anitya we should name it X and then the sourceforge backend in anitya allows to specify a Sourceforge project allowing to search X, libX or libY in the rss feed of the X project on SourceForge. Problem: when adding libX or libY on anitya, the project and homepage are all X and sourceforge.net/projects/X, while this is actually used to make project uniques in anitya (in other words, adding libX and libY won't be allowed).

So this is the current situation and as you can see, it has problems (which explains the two issues reported).


What are the potential solutions?

1/ Extend the unique constraint

We could include the tarball name to search for in the unique constraint, which would then change from: name+homepage to name+homepage+tarball

2/ Invert the use of name and tarball

Instead of having the project name be X with a tarball name libX, we could make the project be libX and the tarball be X.

This sounds quite nice and easy, but looking at the project currently in anitya's database, I found projects like:

        name         |                          homepage                           |                  tarball
                     +                                                             +
 linuxwacom          | http://sf.net/projects/linuxwacom/                          | xf86-input-wacom
 brutalchess (alpha) | http://sourceforge.net/p/brutalchess                        | brutalchess-alpha
 chemical-mime       | http://sourceforge.net/projects/chemical-mime               | chemical-mime-data

So for these, the tarball name would become the project name and they would be pretty ugly.

I am not quite sure what is the best approach for this.

What do you think?