Re: pgFoundry Download URLs

2009/12/29 Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 3:17 PM, David E. Wheeler <david@justatheory.com> wrote:
>>> Even worse is projects like pgTAP include a .spec file in the distribution. But I can't have an accurate URL in the
.specfile until I've uploaded the distribution. I could then update the spec file, create a new tarball and upload it
againwith the proper URL, but then it'd have *another* fucking ID. I can't win. 
>
>> I realize this isn't funny at all, but I'm LMAO reading it...  what a
>> pain in the tail.
>
> The notion that spec files can be expected to have an exact URL for a
> source file is one of the sillier flights of fancy that I've had to deal
> with in my time packaging stuff for Red Hat/Fedora.  There are way too
> many sites with way too many creative notions about making you click
> here or redirecting your click to some mirror-of-the-moment.  What would
> be a sane design is to have a URL for a page where a human could be
> expected to look to find the file to be downloaded.  I'd say less than
> half of my RH packages actually have wget-able URLs in the Source:
> lines.  The rest require a certain amount of interpretation.
>
> Which is not to say that it wouldn't be nice if pgfoundry were
> better-than-average on this point.  But it's not worse than average;
> it's right in line with the generally abysmal state of persistent URIs.

Awesome.  :-(

...Robert