As of version 1.1.5, novi includes source RPMs (SRPMs) in its output.

If a fair portion of your build tree is SRPMs — that is, your favorite repos don’t have prebuilt packages for your OS/hardware combination — this new version of novi will help weed out the newest source pacakges. In turn, then, you don’t have to build all of the SRPMs and then use novi to sort out the latest binary packages.

As always, you can grab this from the download area.

novi 1.1.4 is now available for download.

This version uses RPM epochs as part of the version comparison.

Sharp-eyed novi users have found a bug with how the program handles RPM’s “epoch” tag. The epoch takes precedence over the version when calculating which is the newer of two RPMs. There are a couple of programs (notably, pilot-link in FC5) for which previous versions of novi mistakenly report the older RPM as the newest.

The good news: I’m testing a fix that should be available for download later this week.

The bad news: if a package has the wrong epoch, then the (corrected) novi calcs in the new version will yield the wrong result.

I’m crafting a novi workaround for the latter issue; but it may be too much of a hack to be worth the effort. The real solution would be to alert package maintainers of the problem — a newer package having a lower epoch — such that they can correct it on their end.

Good news for those of you running Fedora’s latest and greatest: Yannick Sébastia has kindly provided a novi RPM for FC5. All yours for taking.

novi 1.1.2 is available for download. There are no functional changes, just fixes for the build process. For example, some FC3 builds failed because I failed to include Expat as a linked library.

If you build novi from source, you may want to try this release.