Pmd: Automated way for PMD clients to learn about new versions

[rsoesemann]

@ChuckJonas the provider of a VS Code PMD Plugin for Salesforce want's to allow his plugin to offer an Auto-Upgrade whenever a new PMD version is available. This ticket should provide a lightweight solution for this.

An idea is using the new GitHub Packages feature.

@ChuckJonas can you elaborate a bit on what you would need and how you see "Packages" solve this? @adangel did you already think about using this new feature for PMD?

[adangel]

I didn't consider github packages yet, because we have already a binary repo: maven central
You can learn about the available versions by polling: https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/net/sourceforge/pmd/pmd/maven-metadata.xml

In maven central, we don't publish the binary distribution, but that would be available on github releases: https://github.com/pmd/pmd/releases/latest
Github also provides an API, so you can do that:

VERSION=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/pmd/pmd/releases/latest | jq --raw-output ".tag_name")
DOWNLOAD_URL=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/pmd/pmd/releases/latest | jq --raw-output ".assets[].browser_download_url" | grep pmd-bin)
echo "version=${VERSION}"
echo "url=${DOWNLOAD_URL}"

[ChuckJonas]

awesome, I think this should give me what I need to add some auto-update capabilities.

Cheers

[rsoesemann]

@ChuckJonas I made you assignee. Would you mind closing this when the existing solution works out for you?

[ChuckJonas]

weird, I'm still unable to close this issue.

(You can go ahead and close it out... If I have any issue I will reopen)

Thanks

[Fernal73]

As emailed to Andreas earlier, PMD 6.22 is not available at https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/net.sourceforge.pmd/pmd-java

This appears to have happened before with another project.
https://github.com/eclipse/jetty.project/issues/2309

I wasn't aware that mvnrepository.com was a third-party site.