Re: uploading distfiles

[Brook Milligan <brook%nmsu.edu@localhost>]

> On Aug 21, 2019, at 4:09 PM, Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
> It strikes me as a bug that they aren't fetched from upstream, and best
> to fix that.

I have always thought so too every time I have written a package for CTAN and had to remember the magic variable to set to get it to download.

Does anyone have a clear understanding of why this particular set of packages is like this?  Yes, they are mostly (always?) unversioned, but we handle that by using DIST_SUBDIR for them all, and presumably the checksum failure and the failover to another repository will catch all the changes with the minor cost of some extra fetch requests across the network.  That is not so very uncommon though for lots of other packages.

If there is no clear reason for keeping this special behavior for these packages, I suggest that they be handled like all the rest and be downloaded first from the upstream site.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Brook