Re: pgFoundry Download URLs

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.
        regards, tom lane