Hi folks,
I am maintaining the Fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net) package of
ethereal. If you don't know Fink, it's a tool which builds packages
(.debs) from source for the user... to do so, besides other things we
specify a source file URL in a description file, like this:
Source:ftp://ftp.ethereal.com/pub/ethereal/ethereal-%v.tar.bz2
(the %v is automatically replaced by the current version).
Now, there is a problem with that approach: whenever you guys release a
new version of this excellent tool, you move away the old source into
the "old-versions" directory.
So, I could work around that by just using the "old-version" URL all
the time. But obviously then it won't work with the new version. Ouch.
My current solution is to specify a "custom mirror" in the package
list. that is, I can specify multiple URLs from which the file can be
downloaded, and if one fails, Fink will try the next one, etc. This
works, but is crude, because it means once a version is outdated,
people who try to build that package first get a download failure
error, then the download has to be retried (and that can happen for a
variety of reason; e.g. the new version is normally not immediately
moved into our "stable" software tree, because we first verify it
actually works correctly etc.). Furthermore, it makes it kinda annoying
to specify a full mirror list - I'd love to specify all your download
mirrors, in an attempt to reduce load on your main mirror. But in the
current situation, that would be pretty useless, because I'd have to
specify each mirror twice, once with "old-version" and once without;
and then the user experience wouldn't be very good easy, because with a
50% probability Fink would pick a "bad" mirror.
So, my request would be this: if possible, can you make a copy of the
latest version in "old-version" immediately after it has been archived?
This way, my package (and those of other similar systems like Gentoo,
or OpenDarwin etc.) could just always use the "old-versions" URL. It
would make my life quite a lot easier, while it would seem it wouldn't
make your life any harder (or at least I hope this is so, pleas correct
me if I am wrong).
Cheers,
Max
