For what it's worth, here's a little Python script I use to keep my local package repository up to date. Martin posted something similar recently, but it was in Perl, to which I have a slight allergy. Run it in the same directory that your *.pkg.tar.gz files live. There are a few configuration variables at the very top that you can change. Hopefully it's pretty self-explanatory. #!/usr/local/bin/python # user-configurable variables FTP_SERVER="ftp.xemacs.org" PACKAGE_DIR="/pub/xemacs/beta/xemacs-21.0/packages/binary-packages" fetch_all = 0 # if fetch_all is nonzero, we get all packages on the server. # Otherwise we only update the packages which are already present in the # current directory. verbose = 1 # end of user-configurable variables import os, string from ftplib import FTP def newer(a,b): # args are 2-tuples containing (major, minor) version number if a[0]>b[0]: return 1 elif a[1]>b[1]: return 1 else: return 0 ## parselist takes an "ls"-type listing of XEmacs packages and returns ## a dictionary, where the key is basename of the package, and the ## value is a 3-tuple of the form ## (version-major, version-minor,filename) def parselist(listing): dict={} for f in listing: words = string.split(f,'-') if words[-1] != 'pkg.tar.gz': if verbose: print "skipping", f continue version = string.split(words[-2],'.') name = string.join(words[:-2],'-') if name in dict.keys(): if not newer(version, dict[name]): if verbose: print f, 'is not newer than', dict[name][2] continue dict[name] = (version[0],version[1],f) if verbose: print name, version[0],version[1] return dict if verbose: print "Local packages" local = parselist(os.listdir(".")) ftp = FTP(FTP_SERVER) ftp.login() ftp.cwd(PACKAGE_DIR) if verbose: print "Remote packages:" remote=parselist(ftp.nlst()) ##callback function for ftp.retrbinary openfile = None def storeit(data): if openfile: openfile.write(data) if fetch_all: packages = remote.keys() else: packages = local.keys() for key in packages: if newer(remote[key],local[key]): name = remote[key][2] if verbose: print "fetching", name openfile = open(name,"w") ftp.retrbinary('RETR '+name, storeit, 1024) openfile.close() os.unlink(local[key][2])