Replying to multiquadric:
This page detects QGIS3 version updates. Did not see the code in the Portfile. The version checking is working (mysteriously) to me.
https://ports.macports.org/port/qgis3/details/
It's not mysterious; it's handled by the github portgroup.
Work may needed on the QGIS distribution (not MacPorts). The version.txt files appear to required manual curation.
If you mean that the version.txt file appears to be outdated then I agree with you.
This page detects QGIS3 LTR (Long-term release) version updates. I did see code. One gets a "404" though.
https://ports.macports.org/port/qgis3-ltr/details/
426 livecheck.url https://qgis.org/version-ltr.txt
The two relevant URLs appear to be:
QGIS: https://version.qgis.org/version.txt
#QGIS Version 33800|Visit https://download.qgis.org to get your copy of version 3.38.0|<html><body>
<ul>
<li>The current released version of QGIS is 3.38.0.
<li>We are working on 3.39-Master. It will go into feature freeze on 2024-09-13 12:00:00 UTC and be released as 3.40 on 2024-10-25 12:00:00 UTC.
<li>Details on changes can be found on github at <a href="https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/commits/master">https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/commits/master</a>.
</body>
</html>
QGIS-LTR: https://version.qgis.org/version-ltr.txt
#QGIS Version 33408|Visit https://download.qgis.org to get your copy of version 3.34.8|<html><body>
<ul>
<li>The current available LTR version of QGIS is 3.34.8.
<li>The latest available version of QGIS is 3.38.0.
<li>We are working on 3.39-Master. It will go into feature freeze on 2024-09-13 12:00:00 UTC and be released as 3.40 on 2024-10-25 12:00:00 UTC.
<li>Details on changes can be found on github at <a href="https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/commits/master">https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/commits/master</a>.
</body>
</html>
Ok, so they changed the hostname for the version files. Easy to change.
I'll fix qgis3-ltr to use version-ltr.txt from the new URL. We could switch qgis3 to use version.txt. It would have the advantage that the version number would be reported "correctly", with dots separating the numbers instead of underscores as we have currently due to the way the github portgroup works and the way this project tags their releases. However, version.txt currently says 3.38.0 is the latest, as you said, but 3.38.1 has been available for a week; not sure why version.txt is lagging.