[mira_talk] Re: Stable download URLs on sourceforge
- From: Peter Cock <p.j.a.cock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "mira_talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <mira_talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 12 May 2014 09:36:49 +0100
On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 9:21 PM, Bastien Chevreux <bach@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 09 May 2014, at 12:12 , Peter Cock <p.j.a.cock@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I appreciate you are trying to make it clear to new-comers which
>> is the current stable and development release (although SF tries
>> to help with their "Looking for the latest version?" link).
>
> Yeah, and even that doesn’t really work as too many people seem
> to visit SF on Windows, get the source package as download link
> and then try to compile themselves under Linux *sigh* I’m considering
> making the Linux binary package a default for Windows downloads, too.
Tricky - short of porting MIRA to Windows (joke), that might be best.
>> However, the fact that you move past stable releases from "stable"
>> to "older releases" is frustrating for automation/reproducibility and
>> external documentation - the URLs break :(
>> […]
>> Can you think of another way of doing this which avoids moving
>> things and breaking URLs? e.g. using "v4" for all the stable MIRA
>> v4.x releases.
>
> What I do not want is a directory with hundreds of downloads, more
> or less unsorted. Also, I’d like to save SF some resources by not
> having binary packages of outdated versions sitting around for
> ages … SF is a free resource and one should be careful not to
> overuse it.
I doubt having old releases on disk costs much - they are pretty
small files overall, and the bandwidth costs would be negligible
as newer releases will be more popular.
> Then again I see the pain it causes for automated downloads.
>
> I’ve looked around SF and there is, I think, no ideal solution to this
> dilemma:
>
> 1. One way could be to go via
> "http://sourceforge.net/projects/mira-assembler/files/latest/download”
> By setting a fake browser ID string with curl/wget one even gets
> redirected to the binary version “wanted”. Would that be a possibility
> for the Galaxy install wrapper? I’m keeping these “links” updated.
That would work in some settings, but not for Galaxy where for
reproducibility it is preferred to link to specific versions.
> 2. I could try to create vie the SF shell interface softlinks which
> would point from something like “current/linux-bin.tar.bz2” to
> the current version. However, I’m not completely sure this is
> doable … and whether I would always remeber to do that.
That sounds worth a try - assuming there are parallel static
links for each version.
> 3. I switch to a directory structure many other projects use:
> “something/4.0”, "something/4.0.1", “something/3.9.5” etc.pp.
> The downloads in these subdirectories would have stable URLs.
> However, here too I would, after some time, delete some
> older binary packages. Especially if some severe bug is
> present in those versions which has been fixed in later revisions.
>
> Any comment regarding what would be preferable?
>
> B.
I would prefer option (3), supplemented with (2) perhaps?
This is very common with simple FTP servers, e.g. NCBI
does something like this for the BLAST releases.
However, as noted above, I would prefer not having older
release vanish. This undermines any future reproducibility
checking, e.g. repeating old analyses or for performance
tracking.
Many thanks for considering this,
Peter
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