Re: uploading distfiles

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Mark Davies <mark%ecs.vuw.ac.nz@localhost> writes:

> On 22/08/19 2:30 pm, Brook Milligan wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I didn't instigate this behaviour, but I would suggest that it is more
> than just a minor cost of extra fetches.  There are currently
>>2000 tex packages in pkgsrc.  The average lifetime that any of them
> would be accessible directly from CTAN is 6 months, after which you will
> get the download, checksum failure, download again effect.
>
> This is because texlive rebuild all the tarballs each year - even if the
> underlying packages don't change.

Thanks for explaining.

So it is buggy that we can't do the normal thing, but it's an upstream
bug and unlikely to be fixed :-)