Subject: Old XZ tarballs

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2015 20:58:27 +0100

Hi,

Lasse Collin <[email-masked]> skribis:

> On 2015-10-29 Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> "-=}\*/{=-" <[email-masked]> skribis:
>> 
>> > ERROR: download failed "http://tukaani.org/xz/xz-5.0.4.tar.gz" 403
>> > "Forbidden"
>> 
>> This seems to be an issue at tukaani.org since this URL is still
>> listed at <http://tukaani.org/xz/old.html>.
>> 
>> Lasse: Could it be that the permissions for old tarballs were
>> inadvertently changed?
>
> As documented at the beginning of the page you linked, it's intentional
> but (possibly) temporary. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

Sorry, I had overlooked that.

> For some reason the old XZ Utils versions are more popular downloads
> than the latest versions (5.0.8 and 5.2.2). Perhaps I should move the
> downloads somewhere else to avoid bandwidth quota issues,

Some people move old tarballs to an old/ sub-directory, to make sure
people do not mistakenly take an old version.  I don’t know if that
would help here?

> but on the other hand I feel that it's not nice if source-based
> distributions rely on upstream servers instead of providing their own
> distro-specific mirrors. If you think this isn't a reasonable wish,
> feel free to say so.

Guix does automatically mirror tarballs via its “substitute” mechanism.
However, users can turn it off, in which case they end up downloading
the tarball from the upstream URL specified in the package recipe.

> By the way, is there a reason why you use 5.0.4 instead of 5.0.8 (or
> even 5.2.2)?

No good reason!  We’ll upgrade it as soon as this can be done without
triggering too much rebuild/redownloads for users.

Thank you,
Ludo’.