[xml] Windows Binaries And The Web

[Igor Zlatkovic <igor zlatkovic com>]

Hello there,

This is on the edge of the topic, but I need an advice and am writing to 
the list in hope that many of you who use libxml in many ways will know 
what must be done.

I was examining my server's logs and have paid some attention on how 
people access my site and who directs them to it. I saw that many get 
rewarded with a HTTP 404 (not found) for their visit and started 
investigating why. I found that most of those loosers :) are trying to 
download an older release of libxml binary for Windows.

After having googled a bit, I found that there are numerous resources 
which refer to the binaries in zlatkovic.com/pub/libxml. These are not 
mere webpages. PHP Manuals refer to the iconv binary found there. Even 
makefiles try to download a binary with wget from there.

I presently practice to keep only the latest releases in /pub/libxml on 
my site. All older releases are being moved to /pub/libxml/oldreleases. 
This I do for novice users who visit the site with a browser. They see 
all the packages in their current versions and can hardly miss one of 
the required ones. But the manuals and makefiles break with every update 
of the binaries.

In your opinion, what is the better practice? Keep all releases where 
they are, or keep only the newest and move the older? Should I continue 
the storage the way I do, or should I keep all releases in the place 
where they were released, the old together with the new?

If I don't move the old releases away, new users will see a long list of 
packages with different file names, easily missing the required packages 
(zlib and iconv, for example) and perhaps choosing a wrong version to 
download. That is not very good.

If I move the old releases away, the new users will see much cleaner a 
list of available files but many manuals, scripts and makefiles will 
break trying to wget what isn't there any longer. That is not very good 
either.

So the thing is: I keep the binaries at
  ftp://ftp.zlatkovic.com/pub/libxml/
and
  http://www.zlatkovic.com/pub/libxml/
Both links refer to the same storage. Should I keep moving everything 
but the newest stuff into the 'oldreleases' subdirectory, or should I 
rather keep everything right there where it was released? Or would it be 
best to even separate the packages in /pub/libxml, /pub/libxslt, 
/pub/iconv and so on? Or any combination thereof? What do you think?

Ciao,
Igor