Bill, > >> There is one little problem with this: there is no stable URL for a > >> given version. > > > > Well, there never really was. To date, most old tarballs have > > had only a limited life on kernel.org. > > > Why? I'm not questioning the policy, it's just that if HUGE kernel > versions are kept available forever, a tiny man page tar would not seem > to be a disk space issue.
It's not a space issue -- it's just a question of clutter. Even though I've been the maintainer for coming up for 2.5 years now, Andries was still doing the uploads onto kernel.org until about a year or so ago. I think Andries used to clear down old versions periodically just so it was easier to see which version was the latest. Since I started doing the uploads, I hadn't cleared away any old versions, but yesterday I noticed that the list of files in the directory is getting long, so that it's hard to see what version is latest. So I created the directory "old" and moved all the old stuff in there. Alexander notes that this causes some problem for the LFS folk, since their scripts expect the tarballs to be in stable locations for longer periods. (I was of course unaware of this.) > >> This hurts, e.g., automated Linux From Scratch rebuilds (the > >> official script grabs the URL from the book, but it becomes > >> invalid too soon). [...] > > How about a link in /pub/linux/docs/manpages/ of the form > > "LATEST-IS-m.xy"? Rob Landley was wanting something like this, > > and I guess it would be easy for LFS to build a simple > > script that looks for that link and deduces "man-pages-m.xy" > > from it. (I've just now created such a link in the directory, > > as an example.) > > > Why not just a link with a fixed name (LATEST?) which could be updated? > I assume installing a new version is automated There is no automation on my part. Each time I do a release, I use scp to upload the .tar.gz and .lsm files, and some kernel.org scripts automagically create the .bz2 and .sign files. To maintain any sort of link will either require me to write some script, or manually create the links. > to create and install the > tar, any needed links, the push to mirrors, etc. So it would just be a > single step added to an automated procedure. Yes, I'll write a script to create suitable links. > You could have a link in > "Old" as requested, and any other links as well. Well, I think all that LFS seems to want is links that are stable "for a while" (since I don't suppose that they want to use really old tarballs in any case). So, for the benefit of LFS, I'll just be less aggressive about moving tarballs into "Old" (I'll leave them sitting in http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/manpages/ for a few months at least.) Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk maintainer of Linux man pages Sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 Want to help with man page maintenance? Grab the latest tarball at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/manpages , read the HOWTOHELP file and grep the source files for 'FIXME'. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
