"Autoversion" external links to prevent a 404?

[t-book]

Some of our external links get outdated quite fast and hence will end in a 404. As an example

sudo wget http://www-us.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-8/v8.5.58/bin/apache-tomcat-8.5.58.tar.gz https://docs.geonode.org/en/master/install/advanced/core/index.html?highlight=tomcat#install-geoserver

(minor version changes)

I wonder if it would makes sense to whenever there is some directory listing with a reliable versioning to first retrieve the highest version number to use with wget.

TOMCAT_VERSION=$(wget https://downloads.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-8 -q -O - | grep -Eo "[0-9]{1,}\.[0-9]{1,}\.[0-9]{1,}" | tail -1)
wget http://www-us.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-8/v$TOMCAT_VERSION/bin/apache-tomcat-$TOMCAT_VERSION.tar.gz

While this will prevent a 404, the use of a regex might not be easy to understand for new users … What do you think?

[t-book]

ping @gannebamm

[gannebamm]

Is this still relevant?