The current download URLs look like this:
http://download.origo.ethz.ch/portato/342/portato-0.9.0.2.tar.gz
As one can see, there is a random (?) integer involved (here: 342). This makes it more difficult for download scripts (e.g. ebuilds in a Gentoo system), as you have to look it up and change it for each new release.
Thus: Could this be changed to something like:
http://download.origo.ethz.ch/$PROJ_NAME/$RELEASE_VERSION/$PACKAGE.tar.gz ?
(e.g.: http://download.origo.ethz.ch/portato/0.9.0.2/portato-0.9.0.2.tar.gz)
And btw: The URLs used to be w/o the integer in the middle. - Why wasn't the change announced somewhere? Or did I just not notice it? At least it was surprising, when people told you: "The download URLs in your ebuilds do not work."
Ok - just taking $RELEASE_VERSION might not be sufficient - that's true... but taking $RELEASE_NAME/$RELEASE_VERSION or something alike should do. (And if there are still people which always take the same release name and version, they need to get stab^Walerted, that this is not right behavior.)
Regarding the "scripting": You are right - it would be possible - but not with my problem ;) (I don't want to go into detail here. I'll just wait until a new scheme has been established and will include the numbers till then)
In my case, I actually want to have some release files which will always be located at the same URLs and which I would replace with each new release of my SW. The reason being that my project is a plugin for some other SW using a download manager to offer its users an easy way to install/update existing plugins. That SW obviously relies on the plugin files to always be in the same place.
As it is now I will have to host the release files someplace else which although possible of course is very annoying.
A change like the one described above by the original poster (i.e. where hosting releases on a fixed URL suddenly stopped working) would have been very annoying indeed, had I already been using origo at this time. All users of the plugin would have been forced to update manually at least once to get the newest release files from a different (fixed) URL.
have you thought about using HTTP redirect (status code 302 or 303) for this, at least until we have a solution?
Thanks
Reply #1
This change was made last week as a hotfix to issue 174. you're a disciplined developer and included the version number in the file name which makes each file almost unique hence you didn't experience any problems. Some other projects always publish their releases with the same filename which caused some serious headache.
for now the integer guarantees uniqueness but in the future it should be replaced by a unique release name/release version combination to make the url a little bit more human-readable. your proposal may solve the problem for your specific project structure but not in general e.g. what if a project has 2 releases with the same version number but a different release name (like server and client or something like that)? With your naming scheme the files would be mixed in one directory and overriding would be possible again.
btw by the end of the week a newsletter will be sent which lists a lot of new features and bugfixes. one new feature is that http://download.origo.ethz.ch/portato/ generates a directory list of all releases. as newer releases have always bigger integers in the path you would be able to list and fetch the newest directory by script.