Re: symlink old tarball name to new one

["Yann E. MORIN" <yann.morin.1998@anciens.enib.fr>]

All,

Recently, the gdb release tarballs were re-released to fix the GPL
compliance issue with the cgen files. That's fine so far.

What's problematic is that the old tarballs were deleted, and new tarballs
were cretaed with an alternate name. This poses two problems.


First, autobuilders such as crosstool-NG or buildroot (but also many others)
that need to download the gdb sources now choke on the missing /legacy/
versions. This is an issue, because existing releases of these tools are
broken.


Second, the new tarballs were created with an 'a' appended to the version
string, making for example '7.1' being called in fact '7.1a', but the
directory within those tarballs are still named after the real version, in
this case '7.1'. So it is not possible to easily derive the tarball name
from the version string, and then the directory name from the tarball name.

Either we use an 'a' at the end of the version, and we can get the tarball
but we don't know the directory name; or we ignore the 'a', so we know the
directory name, but can't find the tarball.


On Thursday 01 September 2011 11:51:37 Abdoulaye Walsimou GAYE wrote:
> How about to have the same simlinks  to new gdb tarballs name?

I second Abdoulaye's suggestion.

As 'ratmice' said on IRC, this has a drawback for those tools that do check
the tarballs using md5 (or sha1...). Using signatures is not an issue.
But not all tools do use md5 (or even sigs).

Providing legacy symlinks that point back to the new releases (for example
gdb-7.1.tar.bz2 points to gdb-7.1a.tar.bz2, ditto for .sig) would be a great
help for those projects.

For information, the binutils guys did agree to have those /legacy/ symlinks
put in place for binutils (which was Abdoulaye's initial forwarded message):
  http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2011-09/msg00000.html

Regards,
Yann E. MORIN.

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