Re: ITP moratorium

[Frédéric L. W. Meunier <1 at pervalidus dot net>]

On Sat, 6 Mar 2004, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 07:55:17PM -0300, Fr?d?ric L. W. Meunier wrote:
> >On Sat, 6 Mar 2004, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >
> >> On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 01:02:48AM -0300, Fr?d?ric L. W. Meunier wrote:
> >> >But taking a close look at article.db, it seems everything that goes to
> >> >ports.html was or is in index.html ?
> >>
> >> articles.db is the master source for the software and news.  You can
> >> always check the web pages out via cvs if you are curious about how
> >> things work.
> >>
> >> >Example:
> >> >
> >> >Title:  BerkeleyDB 4.0
> >> >Url:    http://batousai.sdf-eu.org/BerkeleyDB/BerkeleyDB-4.0-cygwin.tar.gz
> >> >
> >> >A more recent version is in Cygwin. Not to mention the link is
> >> >broken.
> >>
> >> ...which was *exactly* what you were going to research.  Why are you arguing
> >> the point again?
> >
> >Yes, but I was going to edit ports.html, and didn't know that
> >editing article.db will also change such news.
>
> That was two messages ago.  This isn't an argument.  I was telling
> you what you should offer patches against.
>
> >> Since you didn't provide a diff, I just quickly went through
> >> the ported software list and found that all of the links,
> >> except the one that you mentioned are still active.
> >
> >Or redirecting to another.
> >
> >> I didn't try to determine if the links still provided a
> >> cygwin version of a package but I am satisified that the list
> >> still serves its purpose.
> >
> >Exactly.
> >
> >1- FreeCIV seems to have moved to Windows and deprecated
> >Cygwin:
> >
> >http://www.freeciv.org/ftp/packages/windows-X/
> >http://www.freeciv.org/ftp/packages/windows/
>
> For those reading at home, let's recap this discussion:
>
> 1) You send email saying "It's a shame that http://cygwin.com/ported.html
> contains so many broken or outdated links.  Can I go through it and
> submit a diff."

It contained so many a few months ago, but you probably removed
all. My fault for not reviewing it. Now it just contained one.
Others are just redirections.

> 4) I mention that this is what you were going to research,
> hadn't submitted a diff.

Because it doesn't look right to send updates to a file that
will also update the news and break them, right ? What could I
do ?

Let's say I update "foo 0.1.0" to point to a new 0.2.0 binary
release. Then http://cygwin.com/ported.html will look right,
but the news will break, since 0.2.0 wasn't available at the
announcement time. There are other cases.

It's like if I were going to update links in a ChangeLog (the
news entries) file.  It's old stuff. What I can and should do
is update those that are in README (ports.html).

> 5) You are still hung up on the fact that you didn't know
> about article.db. And, *now* you are start submitting updates
> but still not in the form of a diff.

article.db isn't the problem. I could edit it and submit a
diff. The problem is ported.html being generated from the news
entries.

And besides the broken link, I didn't submit any updates, just
pointed out things that you or any Cygwin developer could look
at, like the shareware license, the inclusion of cygwin1.dll
without the sources etc.

But I agree with you that such packages that "are going to be
used by a few people" have a place in ports.html.

> So, ok.  Nevermind.  Don't worry about it.  This is too
> painful a transaction for such a minor task.

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