svn commit: r381760 - in head/x11-fonts/sourcesanspro-ttf: . files

[Alexey Dokuchaev]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 12:43:17PM -0600, Adam Weinberger wrote:
> It would be so unbelievably nice if we had a way to just specify the
> destination filename, using fetch -o. All the bizarre names that files
> are published as, the unversioned tarballs, the documentation files
> labelled Documentation.pdf, and the fallout from changes like this....
> we could make our lives so much easier with a DISTFILE_DEST variable.

Current situation with the distfiles in the industry is indeed very bad.
Old-skool folks that obeyed the rule of "foo-0.42.tar.gz" distfile which
extracts into "foo-0.42" directory, fetchable as regular file with known
Content-Length and Last-Modified headers (to allow working progress bars
and sane mirroring) are minority now, and soon may cease to exist.

New-age hipsters tell you to "always git clone, no thinking required" and
rarely care to upload ./configure-ready tarball, or at least tag their
releases so GH can try to provide reliably fetchable and mirrorable files.

As to Adam's idea, I don't see what can be done, apart from tell upstream
how important it is to produce normal old-fashioned releases from time to
time.

DISTFILE_DEST, while looking good at the first glance, raises at least
some important questions of its own: how do we mirror these files?  What
should be their mtime, so mirrors won't have to refetch the same bits all
over again?  Do we need/want to maintain relationship between upstream
and our DISTFILE_DEST'ied name, and how do we do it if we do?

./danfe

P.S.  No wonder sf.net is still alive: they know how to maintain sane
CDN for tarballs and data, which backs up all their drawbacks.