If you don't know what urlgrabber is, you can safely ignore this message. As urlgrabber has grown and been used by more projects, it's getting harder to a) support all the needed features (byte-ranges, etc) b) keep all the old features (python 1.5.2 - 2.2) c) maintain clean(ish) code After talking with seth, I think I'm going to make my own life easier by rewriting it with a slightly different internal design (which I'm willing to discuss with interested parties) and abandoning support for pre-2.2 python (this allows me to work solely through urllib2, which is much much nicer than urllib). I will continue to support the 0.x series of urlgrabber (the one that will remain in the 1.x yum) for bugs, etc, but it will probably not get new features. The plan is that the new version will be very backward-compatible, although not completely. For the most part, if you have a system where the new version CAN work (python 2.2+) then most-likely, it simply WILL work. Also, there was some discussion of how urlgrabber should be used by other programs (yum, for example). Should urlgrabber have its own rpm (deb, whatever) and simply be called as a dependency? Or should it be slurped into a codebase occasionally. The former requires much more careful backward compatibility and therefore places much tighter constraints on urlgrabber's evolution. Because urlgrabber is still young and changing fairly rapidly, I lean toward the latter. OK, that's a summary of what's going on with urlgrabber. None of this is final, although I will probably treat it as such if there is no discussion. Feel free to discuss, request, etc. -Michael -- Michael Stenner Office Phone: 919-660-2513 Duke University, Dept. of Physics mstenner@xxxxxxxxxxxx Box 90305, Durham N.C. 27708-0305
