Hi Steve, As a developer, I like to script things that I need to do repeatedly, to the extent possible, and regularly use wget and curl. I'm on board with whatever can be done to make it simple for developers to script fetching these artifacts with minimal frustration.
+1 for me. -Davin On Thu, Dec 15, 2022 at 11:00 AM Steve Lawrence <slawre...@apache.org> wrote: > For linking to the latest release artifacts on our webpage, we currently > use the closer.lua script described here: > > https://infra.apache.org/release-download-pages.html > > For example, to download the latest source release, our website links here: > > > > https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.lua/daffodil/3.4.0/src/apache-daffodil-3.4.0-src.zip > > This goes to an HTML page listing mirrors and verification instructions. > > Unfortunately, this means that if a user just uses wget/curl to download > the link, they will just get an HTML page instead of the actual zip, > which can lead to confusion when installation/checksum/gpg verification > fails. I know I've done this in the past, and just supported a user that > ran into this as well. > > And I think linking to this HTML page doesn't really provide much > benefit anymore. It used to list a number of alternative mirrors, but > relatively recently it switched to only listing dlcdn.apache.org, so the > CDN automatically determines the best mirror. Additionally, our download > page already mentions that downloads should be verified, and links to > instructions on how to do so. So this page doesn't really provide any > new information. > > According to first link, we still must use the closer.lua script, but we > can add the "action=download" query parameter to automatically redirect > to download the file. So for example, the above link would become: > > > > https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.lua/daffodil/3.4.0/src/apache-daffodil-3.4.0-src.zip?action=download > > An added benefit to this is closer.lua supports archives, so we would no > longer need to change the links of previous releases to directly point > to the archive URL. For example, this link to an archived release works > fine: > > > > https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.lua/daffodil/3.3.0/src/apache-daffodil-3.3.0-src.zip?action=download > > One downside I see to this is if you wget this URL, the resulting > filename includes the query parameter. It's a bit unhelpful since a user > would likely need to remove it, but at least they get what they > intended. There might also be a wget option to fix this, or if we do go > this route, maybe we can suggest to infra a new closer.lua script that > has the same behavior but with action=download as the default (e.d. > download.lua). > > Thoughts? >
