Re: Hosting Win32 binary packages of GNOME stuff on ftp.gnome.org?

[Tor Lillqvist <tml iki fi>]

Back in August:

Owen Taylor writes:

 > >  > what the directory structure should be. One possibility would
 > >  > be to mirror sources/ [as] binaries/win32/gtk+/2.4/

I write:

 > > You mean the full URI to a zipfile would look like for instance 
 > > ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/ORBit2/2.13/ORBit2-2.13.0.zip
 > > Seems OK to me.

Jeff Waugh writes:

 > I seem to have missed most of this discussion, only finding this in my inbox
 > just now. I designed the current structure, so have some interest in changes
 > or enhancements made to it. :-)
 > 
 > The tree was designed such that binaries of GNOME releases would live under
 > each suite's release directories, for example:
 > 
 >   platform/
 >     2.11/
 >       2.11.1/
 >         sources/
 >           ORBit2-2.13.0.tar.gz
 >         win32/
 >           ORBit2-2.13.0.zip
 > 
 > Obviously, this very heavily optimises for the GNOME release structure and
 > schedule. But that was the point! :-)

Jeff's suggestion was the path taken, and has worked fine so far.

The only slight misfeature has been that for packages where the
version hasn't changed between releases I have (hard)linked the
binaries into several places, but the mirrors of master.gnome.org
won't do that, so these files end up as several copies on the
mirrors.)

One other problem came up recently: Where to put binaries for stuff
that isn't part of the platform or desktop suite?  More specifically,
somebody asked for binaries of libgsf the other day. The libgsf
sources are not under platform or desktop. So for this kind of
packages, Owen's suggestion would have been better.

My idea now is to change to using Owen's plan, but still also keep the
current {platform,desktop}/2.x/2.x.y/win32 directories, but those
would now then just contain symlinks to the actual stuff under
binaries/win32/<module>/<major.minor>.

For instance, /pub/gnome/platform/2.14/2.14.2/win32/glib-2.10.3.zip would be a
symlink to /pub/gnome/binaries/win32/glib/2.10/glib-2.10.3.zip.

And libgsf Win32 binaries would be in binaries/win32/libgsf/x.y and
nowhere else, as libgsf isn't part of platform or desktop.

I don't know whether the mirrors will automatically pick up such a new
binaries folder, though?

Jeff continues:

 > Tor, do you forsee the win32 releases keeping up with the GNOME release
 > schedule? It would be *very* exciting if that were the case. Even if your
 > releases were staggered, aligning the version number with the appropriate
 > GNOME release would still be a huge step forward, particularly for any
 > developers using the GNOME platform on Windows (and we want more of those).

This has mostly worked out fine, yes. During the 2.12 and 2.13 phases
some Win32 binaries were released with slightly skewed versions as the
Win32 changes were not committed in synch with the releases, but in
2.14.0 the versions are the same in sources and win32, as far as I can
recall.

I didn't do any Win32 releases for 2.14.1, out of laziness, as it
didn't seem to contain that many changes relevant for Win32 (the
freshest gtk and glib binaries are anyway available on ftp.gtk.org),
but for 2.14.2 I will build and release Win32 packages.

--tml