On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 3:08 PM, Kyle Neath <[email protected]> wrote:
> For your particular project, it may not cause problems. But throwing around
> regex's often have unintended consequences.
>
> I'm open to suggestions to make our downloads better, I'm just failing to
> see a problem that needs fixing.  If I download "bup-bup-v2.1-0ccc.tar.gz" I
> am just as likely to use the software as if I download "bup-v2.1.tar.gz"

As it happens, you'd be downloading something even worse:
apenwarr-bup-bup-1.40-0-g1234567.tar.gz, which is just incredibly
unwieldy compared to the equally precise and much more succinct
bup-1.40.tar.gz.

Basically, tarballs exported in this way are just not very helpful to
the kinds of people who need tarballs.  One of the most important
(imho) reasons to have tarballs at all is so that distributions like
Debian/Fedora/etc can use them as the official "upstream version" when
building their packages.  Distros like Debian get particularly uptight
about renaming or modifying the upstream tarball; the whole point of
their system is that the changes Debian made vs. upstream are always
kept completely separate.

I'm not the first one to have this problem:
http://blog.usarundbrief.com/?p=36

But his method doesn't work (anymore?) for anything except (possibly)
the Pause server he's using.

With my proposed change, lots of projects will have the auto-generated
tarballs just automagically have the right name, rather than *all* of
them having a bad name.  Even if the "regexes have unintended
consequences", the worst that can happen is that you still have an
unhelpful name.  (Although I can't actually imagine anything bad that
these prefix-stripping regexes could actually do.)

I'll put the question back to you: why *is* the current behaviour to
use such verbose names?  Who benefits from that?

Thanks,

Avery

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