CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

The Drupal Update module can only track the status of modules installed from tarballs produced by drupal.org. In turn, CiviCRM isn't available on Drupal.org due to licensing differences; all files hosted on Drupal.org are required to be GNU GPL v2 or higher, whereas CiviCRM is GNU Affero GPL v3.

The core Update module is limited even for modules and themes which are available from Drupal.org; for example, it can't determine the status of projects installed via CVS (without the CVS Deploy module), nor of inactive projects (as of Drupal 6). In other words, the Update module does the job, but a pretty limited job, and you should know what the limitations are before depending on it.

Thanks choster / Rahul for the explanation. Rather unfortunate that Drupal can not go out to third party sites... would be nice if modules could specify an alternate version look-up URL.

I guess as a request, would be nice if Civi had the capabilities to send admins an email when updates are found. I have Drupal configured that way.