Re: symlink old tarball name to new one

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

Joel, All,

On Monday 12 September 2011 18:40:29 Joel Brobecker wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> We're very sorry about the inconvenience. I discussed the suggestion
> of providing symlinks with RMS, and he said that scripts should be
> fixed instead.

The development trees of affected projects have been easily fixed (or
will soon be fixed) to use the new names. What poses a problem is that
released versions of these projects still use the now-legacy URLs do
download gdb. This means that, until these projects do a new release,
they are completely broken.

> I am only the messenger, so please do not shoot me.

Hehe, of course not! Plus, we probably are on two opposite shores of an
ocean, so that'd be a long shot! :-)

> I tend to agree with RMS, but I admit I do not know about all the
> scripts out there, and the amount of work that this renaming has
> created.

What is the rationale for not providing legacy symlinks, when there are
good reasons exposed previously that would highly benefit? Of course, I
can understand that there are greater reasons not to provide those
symlinks, but I really like to understand... ;-)

What's important in my eyes is that the GPL issue has been fixed, and
that getting the sources will get you the full sources, and a symlink
would just guarantee that; plus, also symlinking the .sig would also
allow for the verification, as it only signs the content.

> > 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.
> 
> This is intentional. This is the exact same GDB version, we just fixed
> the sources. The 'a' in the package name is there to indicate that
> the problem found in those sources has been addressed.

And because the content of the tarball for X.Ya is not exactly the same as
for X.Y, that could be interpreted as being a new version... And again, that
breaks auto-builders that used to rely on the assumption that:
  tarball_basename == dirname

> Note that we provide an md5.sum file on the sourceware.org FTP.

Which is not the main distribution channel (it's official, but not main)
and is lacking the signature files, which are present on ftp.gnu.org.

Anyway, thanks for [hb]earing me! ;-)

Regards,
Yann E. MORIN.

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