The quick solution I came up was a screen-scraper that will take a YAML file listing the relevant modules and their URLs and check to see if a Drupal 6 version has been released as yet. I wrote it in ruby, because after all that PHP work it’s nice to slip back into a language that feels so comfortable. (and hpricot is delightful for quick scraping solutions).

In case it’s helpful for anyone I’ve popped the ruby code and a sample yaml file up as pasties. Currently it’s invoked from the command line (providing you have ruby and hpricot set up) with:

./drupal-modules.rb my-file.yaml

A couple of nice enhancements would be to either grab the list of modules from an existing drupal database, or to set this up as a little web service where people input the modules they use and can check a web page or receive an email when there’s a status update. It could even lead into some discussion of where certain older modules should be considered redundant and/or replaced with newer options. Time’s not likely to let me build that, but I’d love to hear if someone else does.