[112573] trunk/dports/_resources/port1.0/group/github-1.0.tcl

[James Berry]

On Oct 27, 2013, at 5:45 AM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:

> 
> On Oct 26, 2013, at 16:45, James Berry wrote:
> 
>> On Oct 26, 2013, at 2:01 PM, Ryan Schmidt  wrote:
>> 
>>> On Oct 26, 2013, at 14:09, jberry at macports.org wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Revision
>>>> 112573
>>>> Author
>>>> jberry at macports.org
>>>> Date
>>>> 2013-10-26 12:09:19 -0700 (Sat, 26 Oct 2013)
>>>> Log Message
>>>> 
>>>> Allow the github portgroup to specify that tarballs should come from the archive area
>>> 
>>> In what way does this differ from the tags and downloads?
>> 
>> Hi Ryan,
>> 
>> Well… partly because I was confused, and partly because github is apparently changing it’s mind. It seems the downloads method is obsolete,
> 
> Downloads are deprecated. Projects cannot create new downloads, and downloads are no longer shown on the github interface. However downloads that existed before the feature was deprecated still exist, and they can still be downloaded, so ports that use “github.tarball_from downloads” still work.
> 
>> and it also seems that the tarball urls are at least deprecated… see https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/18797 also.
>> 
>> But despite the rumors of deprecation, the tarball/tags url would have worked for me but for a quirk of circumstances that made me believe it was no longer working at all. After your email I went back to check and apparently the tarball style url would work… but note that the checksum is different for some reason between the tarball url for a tag and the archive url for a “release”.
> 
> Ah yes, releases. When I looked into this previously, the only difference between the “tags” download and the “archive” download was the name of the distfile and the name of the enclosing directory, and yes, as a result, the checksums. For this reason I couldn’t just switch the portgroup to always use “archive”, since that would have invalidated the checksums of all existing ports using “tags”.
> 
> Since the “tags” URLs still worked, I didn’t bother making a way to download from “archive”. Do we believe downloading from “tags” will stop working in the future? If so that would be a reason to move toward “archive”. If not, then maybe we don’t want to clutter things up with yet another different way to download.

It’s not really clear to me whether the github folks have made a clear statement on this. I guess we should just continue with the status quo for now, recognizing that we may need to make a change in the future. I’ve reverted my change that added explicit support for the archive URLs.

>> I’m not quite sure where to go from here. If we believe the brew guys, then we shouldn’t be pouring energy into the tarball urls, as they’re old news, and should be adopting the archive urls, which this change goes in the direction of. 
> 
> If we want to move toward adopting “archive” URLs, the best way may be to switch the github portgroup’s default “github.tarball_from” from “tags” to “archive” and edit all ports currently using the portgroup and not setting “github.tarball_from” and set them to “github.tarball_from tags” along with a comment recommending this line be removed and the portfile adapted accordingly at its next version update. (No need to update ports without a version update, since that would just cause an unnecessary extra distfile fetch and mirror.) 
> 
> Things I wasn’t clear on yet:
> 
> * Does livecheck behavior need to be updated for archives?

I didn’t look into this.

> * Some ports fetch from a git commit hash instead of a tagged release. What needs to happen with them?

I think that as long as these continue to work we’re ok.

James