Re: stable gnome sources

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sun, Apr 30, 2000 at 01:17:28PM -0400 or thereabouts, Sean Thomas Middleditch wrote:
> Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/latest/sources/
>
> I don't think that's what he meant...
> I think he wantd a directory that had no subdirectories and contained
> ONLY the latest tarballs of source packages... so he could for example
> type ncftpget ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/latest/sourcelist and get
> all the latest source tarballs, and only the latest sourcetarballs.

I do something very similar. I hop over to the FTP site with ncftp
and list the contents of those directories and I have a script that
basically goes,

#!/bin/sh
cd ~/Grab
date
ncftpget -F ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/...whatever
ncftpget -F ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/...whatever
ncftpget -F ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/...whatever
ncftpget -F ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/...whatever
ncftpget -F updates.redhat.com/whatever-came-up-on-the-security-list
date

And I edit it to be tonight's list, run it with 'at -f grab-list 3am'
and return in the morning to laugh at how long it took (October GNOME
took five hours on my 28.8, although that included all the devel stuff
as well) and to swear at the "couldn't connect to the site I really 
wanted something from" messages that the 'at' command emails me.

I keep meaning to make it more useful so that I can do less typing,
but I can never be bothered or I get sidetracked by strange new
things I learn about bash when looking in the manual. 

Someone asked recently about how to grab "all of latest GNOME"
and I started a "how to do this easily" web page which might get
finished one day and had how to create and run such a script if
you're not used to command lines, shell scripts and so on.

(By the way, gFTP will let you queue multiple files. Go to the ftp
site, find the right directory, select a file, start downloading it,
then click on the ".." at the top of the remote site's listing to
go up a directory and select the next directory and the next file,
and click on that. It will continue downloading the first file but
add the second to a queue and start that automatically when the
first file is done. I don't know how many files it will queue up 
at once, but it saves sitting at the keyboard waiting for each to
finish.)

> Although if we were going to do something like that, I'd suggest
> something more intelligent, like a very simple install script that could
> check the installed packages and only download the new/updated ones (not
> something like Helix GNOME update, just a simple console-based script
> that calls ncftpget or something for this).

If you do, please have the -F flag for passive: this passes even 
firewalls like the monster I sit behind, and ncftpget otherwise
doesn't :)
 
> Then a user could...

I would dearly love to see such a script. It saves me from finishing
mine :)

> feature-wise).  Also, people like me could specific that we want certain
> packages to be installed via RPM (I'd implement this by downloading the
> tarballs and issuing rpm -ta on it)

and rpm -K for files in rpm format? That would be cool (yes, I check
it religiously and it has saved me at least once). 

> Speaking of all this, I think I know what I'm going to work on for the
> next few days... ;-)  Anyone mind if I make a Python script like this?

Please please please! You mind if I brea^Wbeta-test it? 

Telsa