On 2015-10-30 Ludovic Courtès wrote: > Lasse Collin <lasse.col...@tukaani.org> skribis: > > For some reason the old XZ Utils versions are more popular downloads > > than the latest versions (5.0.8 and 5.2.2). Perhaps I should move > > the downloads somewhere else to avoid bandwidth quota issues, > > Some people move old tarballs to an old/ sub-directory, to make sure > people do not mistakenly take an old version. I don’t know if that > would help here?
I don't like to break links intentionally. I know I did exactly that a few days ago, but it cannot be the long-term solution. The links to old versions are on a separate page already, so those using a web browser are unlikely to get an old version by accident. > > but on the other hand I feel that it's not nice if source-based > > distributions rely on upstream servers instead of providing their > > own distro-specific mirrors. If you think this isn't a reasonable > > wish, feel free to say so. > > Guix does automatically mirror tarballs via its “substitute” > mechanism. However, users can turn it off, in which case they end up > downloading the tarball from the upstream URL specified in the > package recipe. OK. :-) Why would users turn it off though? I would guess that one good mirror would be more reliable than dozens of upstream sites of which just one needs to be down to be a problem for a user. A package manager should know the hash or signature of the file, so from security point of view it doesn't matter where the file comes. Note that I have nothing against including the upstream URL in the build scripts. I just wish that it doesn't cause a *large* number of users downloading the file from the upstream instead of distro's mirror. To be fair, xz-5.0.4.tar.gz hasn't been a popular download (xz-5.0.4.tar.bz2 is somewhat popular though), so I believe Guix users haven't caused a significant amount of traffic for me. :-) > > By the way, is there a reason why you use 5.0.4 instead of 5.0.8 (or > > even 5.2.2)? > > No good reason! We’ll upgrade it as soon as this can be done without > triggering too much rebuild/redownloads for users. API/ABI is backward compatible so one shouldn't need to rebuild other packages. There's a mailing list "xz-announce" in case you want a notification when a new version is released: <http://tukaani.org/xz/lists.html> -- Lasse Collin | IRC: Larhzu @ IRCnet & Freenode
