[Distutils] Sourceforge changed HTML again...

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 02:09 PM 01/17/2006 -0600, Ian Bicking wrote:
>Since they have a 5-second delay in downloading, I assume they really
>are trying to get ad clicks (since 1 or 0 seconds would do just as well,
>and direct links would of course be better for everyone).  OTOH, it
>never hurts to ask; maybe someone can open a ticket over on SF?  If
>anyone does, please note that here.  Hell, a stable API with a request
>that API users show a text ad (that would be delivered as part of the
>API) would be fine with me (as a user of easy_install).

I checked what the NetBSD "pkgsrc" system does, and it uses the fact that 
there is a .dl.sourceforge.net subdomain for mirrors.  I investigated 
further and found that dl.sourceforge.net is a round-robin (or random?) DNS 
for each of the mirrors in the subdomain, so there's a simple 
transformation from the user-visible download pages to the actual download 
address.  You can see this in the new fix_sf_url() function I added to 
setuptools.package_index.


>But right now I think it is more useful to encourage people to use the
>cheese shop for file distribution -- SF is also really hard to upload
>to, so the cheese shop is better on both ends.

Yeah, uploading to cheeseshop is great for new projects.  But practically 
speaking, SF *is* used to distribute a lot of things, especially big things 
that mirrors are more useful for.  So, it's definitely good for stuff to 
work.  :)