Portscout is a tool which looks for new versions of software in the
FreeBSD ports tree, and potentially other software repositories. It
is also possible to provide an arbitrary list of software in a simple
XML format.

Various factors make this task a bit more difficult than it might
initially seem. In particular, the array of weird and wonderful
versioning schemes software vendors manage to come up with.

Portscout spawns several child processes and does its version checking
in parallel, while attempting to best-guess strange-looking version
numbers, navigate around unhelpful sites and web servers, and contend
with the CPU-heavy rapidly-expanding FreeBSD ports system.

In addition to all this, it is possible to generate nice HTML reports
and send reminder mails to interested parties.