Re: iso-codes releases

[Alastair McKinstry <mckinstry computer org>]

Elijah Newren wrote:
> Hi Alastair,
>
> The README file in iso-codes seems to suggest you're the one to
> contact.  If that's not correct, I hope you can point me to the right
> place.  As far as I can tell, it appears that the master (and only?)
> download location for iso-codes is
> ftp://pkg-isocodes.alioth.debian.org/pub/pkg-isocodes/.
> Unfortunately, there appears to be a policy in place to delete old
> releases when sending out new ones, which causes problems for people
> trying to build GNOME.  Is there any way we could get a more permanent
> download location for iso-codes tarballs?
>
> One possibility, if necessary, would uploading to ftp.gnome.org; our
> current setup requires a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 and then automatically
> generates the others, so we'd have at least one tarball whose md5sum
> might not match the ones you have.  I'm not sure if that would be
> problematic for you.
>
> Thanks,
> Elijah
Thanks for pointing this out. Yes, we haven't been keeping old copies on
the ftp site;
fortunately they are in Subversion, so I can build them.
 
I plan to keep the XML schema stable, and the data supplied stable.
While they have
had a 0. version code until now, it is possibly a good time to think
about doing 1. releases,
and calling the schema stable.

One of the points of iso-codes is that it becomes possible (once the
schema is stable; it
hasn't changed in many releases, with no changes planned) to update the
dataset while
preserving code compatability; ie. the country code for a country
changes, or more
translations in language xx become available mean a new release of
iso-codes 1.x, but
Gnome 2.14 or whatever can still build against it. Hence rather than
hard-code building
Gnome 2.17 against iso-codes 0.65 , etc. it should be built against
iso-codes 1-latest.tar.gz;
which would be a symlink to 1.65.tar.gz.

Any comments?

- Alastair McKinstry