Re: URL for forge packages

[Thomas Yengst]

> 
> On 16 August 2012 13:14, Carn? 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
> 
> Basically, the word after the equal would be the project and flag used
> to get packages, followed by a URL for a text file that is
> responsibility of that project. That text file would have just the
> project, version, and url lines. Should be pretty simple for a perl
> script to routinely check those URL's for changes and edit the file on
> octave.org.
> 
> I'd guess that XML would be better but having to parse them in Octave
> is more complicated and I don't think we need that.
> 
> Any comments? Can I start writing such scripts?
> 

I think XML is overkill - a self explanatory text file is easier to implement 
and easier to read.

I would assume that one could then just change the url's to local file system 
url - like file://data/stuff/io-1.0.9.tgz?
It is important to be able to use a directory full of packages on a local file 
system. My enterprise setup does not have the cluster computers connected to 
the internet, only to the company LAN (for a lot of reasons). It's much easier 
to maintain all the Forge packages if I can download them all and do an install 
of them all with one command.

Tom