Problem with distfile, how to proceed?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jan 5, 2011, at 06:07, Rainer Müller wrote:
> On 2011-01-05 03:06 , Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> The problem here was I think that you were using a
>> BitBucket-generated distfile, and they did not keep the distfile
>> around anywhere; they re-generated it later, after you had already
>> recorded its checksums into the portfile. I recall there was at least
>> one other DVCS site that was doing something similar, which made it
>> unsuitable for use as a MacPorts master_sites location.
> 
> Yes, the same problem appeared with github in the past for the MacVim port.
> 
> The issue was that the tar format contains the access times of the files
> which changes as soon as you generate the tarball. Therefore the result
> will be different each time you download this as each download triggered
> creation of a new tarball. As an alternative I am now using zip files as
> they do not contain access times.

I thought the problem was that, though the tar file is always the same, gzipping uses entropy, so the same tar file gzips to a different compressed file every time.

> Recently someone reported that the original problem with tar was gone.
> Actually, I got the same checksum for multiple tries now. But I am not
> sure if they just cache the file for a limited time period, so I am
> sticking with zip format for now.

Yes, I believe they were/are caching the file for some period of time, long enough for the distfiles mirror to get the correct file, but then later users might get a newly-generated file, if github's ping time is less than the MacPorts mirrors'.