Re: ~ftp/private/...

[Jason Molenda <jason-swarelist@molenda.com>]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2000 at 06:16:48PM +1000, Andrew Cagney wrote:
> Anyone object to me creating a ~ftp/private (/gdb) directory?

Oh oh, Mr. Carter!  Me, me!


I set up sourceware without a ~ftp/private on purpose.  It is easy
for maintainers or core developers to put things in private
directories needlessly, to cut themselves off from potential
contributors and muckers-at-large (who knows what those random net
people might do!)  The lack of a ~ftp/private dir is not an oversight.

It's the approach we took at Cygnus for a long time[1].  It is the
wrong approach.  So I didn't create a ~ftp/private dir on sourceware
to help break people of these habits.

[1] To be fair, everyone did it this way in the past.  But the world
has progressed, and this approach is no longer favored.

There have been two other instances where the lack of a ~ftp/private 
dir has annoyed maintainers on sourceware, but in both cases we
found usable workarounds.


> I'm going to need somewhere that isn't mirrored to put the dreaded file
> gdb-5.0.tar.gz (well actually gdb-4.18.90.tar.gz, gdb-4.18.91, ....)
> before it gets officially released.


Ah, I would suggest ~ftp/pub/gdb/snapshots/gdb-4.18.9[0-9].tar.gz.
Or when you get really close, ~ftp/pub/gdb/snapshots/gdb-5.0pre1.tar.gz.

What purpose does a private dir serve?  We've been putting snapshots up
in /pub/ for years, how is a snapshot worse?  About the only thing you
need to avoid is putting something called "gdb-5.0.tar.gz" on the ftp
dir that isn't really the final tarball.  But you'd be foolish to do 
something like that even to a private dir.

Free the Software,

Jason