On 04/23/2012 10:09 AM, Rob Weir wrote:
On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Kay Schenk<[email protected]> wrote:
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
OK. I think these three pages are fine. It is the NL pages that I
am concerned about, since they have hard-coded logic that differs from
the above pages.
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?
For example, when we release AOO 3.4, we'll obviously update the logic
on the first three pages (www.openoffice.org, download.openoffice.org
and /other.html). But any other NL pages that are hard-coded to point
to 3.3.0 downloads on MirrorBrain will not.
OK, thanks for this clarification. I was a bit concerned about DL logic
changes this close to an actual release. Plus, I am always concerned
about ongoing maintenance (who has skills etc).
So, I now understand a bit better over your desire for this new
function/mechanism. We have something very close to this now in the
"getLink (VERSION, MIRROR, SCHEMA)" function already in download.js
...but...how to enforce a standard usage....??? I don't have any good
ideas on this
So not really a policy question, but a concern about how we partition
the logic in our website. The NL pages should not need to know about
our release implementation details. They should not be hardcoding
things like:
1) Names of release artifacts.
2) Assumptions about the most recent version of the product.
3) Assumptions about download locations.
yes, you're right...some better practices are in order, and down the
road, maybe some different implementation techniques as well.
I think for now, maybe just a general post directed to our existing NL
site maintainers about what would be "best practice" given what we've
got would be in order, and for those areas which have NO maintainer at
the moment...well, one of the general site maintainers gets to fix them
I guess. Not pretty, I know.
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?
The Release Manager and the rest of the PMC determines these things
when we release.
OK, I didn't mean in a general sense, I meant technically -- a
misunderstanding. I guess this was an awareness, or rather non-awareness
on my part, that some sites were taking liberties with labeling, etc.
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
yes, I see what you mean now...some localized SSI might be in order. I
teluctant to suggest this, given the former nature of the NL sites, but
perhaps some standardized templating should be applied to them.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MzK
"Women and cats will do as they please,
and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."
-- Robert Heinlein
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MzK
"Women and cats will do as they please,
and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."
-- Robert Heinlein
