Re: URL for forge packages

[Søren Hauberg]

On Aug 17, 2012, at 4:42 AM, Carnë Draug wrote:

> On 16 August 2012 13:14, Carnë Draug <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Hi
>> 
>> the current method to get the URL for packages when installing with
>> the -forge flag is to parse the HTML of the package for the version
>> and use it to generate a URL to download it. I see two problems with
>> this:
>> 
>> 1. if we are to change the format of the documentation page this will
>> start failing
>> 2. if we move the packages to another host (as has been discussed
>> before), it will also fail
>> 
>> While such changes are not planned to happen on OF soon, when they do
>> it will mean that users using octave versions before the change won't
>> be able to use the -forge flag. I think to prevent this before becomes
>> an issie it's a good idea.  I would like to propose to have a simple
>> text file on octave.org with this info. 1 line with package names and
>> their URLs would suffice. This would also make the code to get
>> packages from forge simpler since the parsing would also be simpler.
>> 
>> Any comments?
> 
> I gave this some more thought and here's the solution I propose. The
> idea will be to have a text file in octave.org that is automatically
> updated with a file I'll set up in SF. The following syntax for such
> file would allow for other projects similar to Octave Forge (if and
> when they appear) to also have their -project flag in pkg.
> 
> =Forge http://path-text-file-with-list-of-forge-packages
> package1-name package1-version package1-url
> package2-name package2-version package2-url
> package3-name package3-version package3-url
> =ProjectX http://path-text-file-with-list-of-projectx-packages
> package1-name package1-version package1-url

Why not just use Octave's standard file format for loading and saving data, 
such that you do not have to parse anything (just 'load' the file) ?

Søren