I find it time consuming to see if any of the components/modules that I use have been updated. When I was using "Legend of the Green Dragon" (dragonprime.net), I found that they have a pretty good system for alerting people of updates and I thought it might be helpful to the Joomla community as well (perhaps for 1.5?)
Every module that is built has a 'version.txt' that they put in their module package. By going to a particular page in the administrator, it then connects to a set, hard-coded link that would parse the version.txt and tell you if you were up to date or outdated.
Obviously, two things would have to be done as a community:
- Everyone would need to begin including a version.txt (or other similar file) in their modules
- Links to the version.txt would need to be static so that it could connect easily
