Subject: bug#21784: Old XZ tarballs

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 2015 16:07:11 +0100

Lasse Collin <[email-masked]> skribis:

> On 2015-11-02 Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> No problem.  It is best if URLs remain stable over time, but I
>> understand there are cost constraints related to hosting.
>> 
>> Maybe an option for you in the longer term would be to use a service
>> such as savannah.gnu.org, which could host tarballs virtually forever
>> and which is mirrored.
>
> Maybe, I had already thought about that some time ago. On the other
> hand I have felt that it's weird if upstreams should do such things
> solely because package managers in some source-based distros use
> upstreams as their primary source of packages (I don't count Guix into
> this category). Over half of my bandwidth quota is used for serving old
> xz versions and that somehow that doesn't feel right, but perhaps it's
> just me being weird.

I agree that it’s weird that old tarballs get so much attention.

In an ideal world, every distro and user would upgrade on the day of the
new release, but it turns out to take much more time.

Another way to look at it is to think of the web as an append-only
place, similar to Git.  If people want to access old tarballs for
whatever reasons, it should be possible.

Anyway, thanks again.  :-)

Ludo’.