Kevin Fenzi <kevin@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Here's attached another run of my sources/patches url checker. I've got several failures in this list, which reminds me that there's a pretty serious problem with the entire concept of source URL as defined at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/SourceURL Namely, that it assumes there's a nice static URL for you to point at. There are a *lot* of upstreams that obfuscate the URL to some extent or other. I notice that an exception has been made for sourceforge,net, without explaining why; but of course the reason why is that they like to throw random mirror names into the actual URL. mysql.com does the same, and some other sites have setups that throw package numbers or session IDs or other useless crud into the URL. Not only does this sort of stuff make it hard to usefully provide "the URL at which you can download an exact copy of this tarball", but it makes it even harder to provide "the URL at which you should start looking if you want to find the next updated version of this package". Which to my mind is a *far* more important use of the site portion of a Source: line than the first usage. Let me give a concrete example of one of the cases that Kevin's script is complaining about. According to my browser log, the URL I actually downloaded the latest mysql source tarball from was http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/mysql-5.1.31.tar.gz/from/http://mysql.mirrors.hoobly.com/ Not only is this an inappropriate link for 90% of the planet to be using, but it flat out won't work as a Source: line because the filename isn't the last component. And what's considerably worse IMNSHO is that it's unhelpful for someone who wants to get the next version of mysql when that comes out. There is no way that you'd intuit from this that the page to visit is http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html. (The apparent solution of looking at /get/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/ does not work.) Out of the thirteen packages I maintain, five have some issue of this sort, so it hardly seems like this is an ignorable corner case. I don't know what an appropriate set of rules is, but I wish that the Source-URL packaging guidelines bore some resemblance to the real world of modern web design. (Or misdesign, perhaps, but that's what's out there.) The special exception for sourceforge needs to be replaced with some more general discussion of what to do with bizarre website layouts. regards, tom lane -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
