[twg-tds] archive files and versioning

[George Georgalis]

I hope I'm posting to the appropriate list.

I found broken links on
http://tug.org/twg/

The "TUG Technical Council" mailing list is "devfund" (?) @tug.org
http://tug.org/tc/

There is a broken link in CTAN announcements and updates for subscribe on
http://tug.org/ctan.html
(ilinks to http://ctan.loria.fr/subscribe.ctan-ann.html)

Anyway,

I'm writing about the absence of version numbers in the
tex archive files. I imagine this has been discussed before and
I'm not interested in reloading a flame. But from a 3rd party
perspective, there is a problem with not having versioned archive
files available. I appreciate the convenience of always having
the same name for release files but the specific consequence of
only releasing archives that way is the inability of third parties
to perform integrity validation. When one version is tested, and
another version is released of the same name, the validation
testing fails.

I propose, continuing to offer unversioned files in the tex archive
but also offering versioned equivalents for a limited time.

for example if helvetic.tar.xz was also available as
helvetic-20100610.tar.xz

http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/archive/helvetic.tar.xz
http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/archive/helvetic-20100610.tar.xz

Than anyone requiring specific versions could access the
particular ones and symlinks or copy of the original would make
the unversioned name also available. A policy of 6 months hosting
of deprecated versions (if they don't have security issues) would
aid in coordination as well.

I appreciate tug is a *big* project and infrastructure with many
factors to consider. If retooling infrastructure, bandwidth or
disk-space is an issue, perhaps hosting the archives on sourceforge
or similar would solve that problem---create a branch repository
there for release versions and let them manage hosting, storage
and bandwidth?

Regards,
George