On 04/22/2012 02:22 PM, Rob Weir wrote:
The vast majority of our downloads come from one of three pages:
I offer a bit of historical perspective on these for what it's worth:
1) www.openoffice.org/
-- the latest friendly action oriented page that grew out from the
revised...(I can get everything I want from the home page.)
2) download.openoffice.org/
-- penultimate download page from a Download link. Incorporates same
logic as DL button on home page. (One page click to DL)
3) www.openoffice.org/download/other.html
-- basically the original, original, download page which also
incorproated information that couldn't be fit elsewhere. The user
explicitly chooses the download without js logic assistance
These three pages currently forward download requests to SourceForge.
There are other places on the website that do other things. For
example, the Dutch and Norwegian pages point directly to MirrorBrain
downloads:
http://www.openoffice.org/da/
http://www.openoffice.org/no/
http://www.openoffice.org/es/
(There may be others as well, but I noticed those three)
Other ML pages do other things. For example, the German page just
points to download.openoffice.org, where the user is given the English
install instructions:
http://www.openoffice.org/de/
The French page manages its own download page that directs to
download.services.openoffice.org, which uses MirrorBrain:
http://www.openoffice.org/fr/Telecharger/
To put it kindly, the logic here is sub-optimally factored.
Is there anything we can do to improve on this?
For example, imagine if we had either a Javascript function or REST
API that allowed things like this:
download(product,language, platform, version)
Like:
download("aoo","en_us","win32","3.4.0")
or
download("sdk","","","latest") (We could allow "latest" as a
psedu-version number so most NL pages can code their download logic
once and not need to update it when a new release comes out. We
centralize the logic of what is the "latest" version for a particular
language in one place)
As a REST API the same could look like this:
http://www.openoffice.org/download?product=aoo&locale=en_us&platform=win32&version=-3.4.0
Does this make sense to anyone?
maybe...is your concern about "policy" -- what pages can link to what
download area, or
implementation --- how is the appropriate download determined
Could you elaborate a bit more?
It all about avoiding have the
website make too many assumptions about release file names, mirror
infrastructure and other implementation details of the download
delivery process.
So who or what would make those assumptions instead?
Instead we should have a centralized place where
that logic lives, so it can be maintained in one place, debugged in
one place, and when we have a new release, updated in one place.
-Rob
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MzK
"Women and cats will do as they please,
and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."
-- Robert Heinlein
