September 5, 2001
Meatfinder is a little script that I use to grab freshmeat's XML project record for a given project.
Use it like this:
$ meatfinder template-mode fetching template-mode... $ xmlgrep ~/.meatcache url_tgz http://freshmeat.net/redir/template-mode/18938/url_tgz/ $ wget `xmlgrep ~/.meatcache url_tgz` ...
Unfortunately, a large number of projects on freshmeat have their 'url_tgz' field pointing to a webpage rather than directly at a tarball. But this at least helps to grab a project's record for quick browsing.
xmlgrep is a quick python script that I threw together to quickly grab a field from an XML file. It was written specifically for use with meatfinder, so it might not be useful in a general-purpose case.
If you think meatfinder is useful, let me (brian@bstpierre.org) know. Encourage projects that list releases on freshmeat to point their url_tgz field directly at the tarball instead of at a webpage that lists the files. This makes it easier for meatfinder and other similar programs to automatically download package updates.