Hi Stefan, You are correct that you won't benefit from publishing metalinks, but your users might. One of the failures a redirect/GeoIP based approach can't solve for the user is possible firewall problems. The user may be behind a firewall which restricts to HTTP connetions, not knowing that for sure he/she would have to try the GeoIP suggestion. If that fails, manually retry. That would be solved by having a smarter and better informed download program, which metalinks can help create. Another benefit is that the download client can also verify the download afterwards, without the user having to run any extra commands after the download finished.
About the digest information coming from a reliable central source, you are already doing that with your download page by pointing only to the central MD4/SHA1/signature files. I've rewritten the page to keep other people from getting confused about that :) Thank you very much for your comments on the links. If you ever end up trying metalinks, feel free to drop the metalink community[1] a line or mail me directly. All the best! Bram [1] http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/metalinks/wiki/CommunityInformation On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 10:46 +0200, Stefan Bodewig wrote: > Hi Bram, > > On 2009-09-01, Bram Neijt <bne...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Of course I'm happy to answer any and all question in this thread also. > > Feel free to just mail 'no' if you are not interested in making changes > > to your project's download homepage. > > Our download pages are created by CGI scripts that already selects the > user's closest mirror (based on IP number and some GeoIP database) and > recommend a few others, so I don't think we'd ebenefit from the > metalinks link at all. In particular since the list of ASF mirrors is > maintained centrally. > > I'm not sure whether I understood the description of "getting the > checksums from a single source" in the links you posted correctly. We > wouldn't want users to trust any signatures or checksums downloaded from > anywhere but the central ASF site and thus our download page explicitly > sends users to the main site only for those sort of files. > > Stefan > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@ant.apache.org > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@ant.apache.org
