[Distutils] Sourceforge changed HTML again...

[Ian Bicking]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>>>Hi all.  Ian Bicking reported an issue with Sourceforge's download process
>>>changing again; I've updated setuptools in SVN but haven't made a new
>>>release yet.  If you need the fixed version, update to the development
>>>version via "ez_setup.py setuptools==dev" for now.  Thanks.
>>
>>This is a probably a FAQ, but maybe the Sourceforge guys can be talked into
>>providing some machine-friendly way for downloading files?
> 
> 
> They have already done it, and I've changed setuptools to use it now (as of 
> r42088).  I've now removed all of the code originally contributed by Ian to 
> parse SourceForge's "human user" HTML and simply preprocess 
> prdownloads.sf.net URLs to a similar path on dl.sourceforge.net, which is a 
> round-robin DNS for the various mirrors.  This cuts two page fetches out of 
> the process and eliminates any HTML scraping dependencies.  As long as SF 
> doesn't get rid of the *.dl system, this should continue to work no matter 
> how much the HTML frontend changes.

So far my experiences downloading this way have been very poor -- it 
fails more often than not, often stalling indefinitely.  What are other 
people's experiences?  If my experience is typical, I think it would be 
better to go back to the regex way with a fixed regex -- it may be 
fragile in the long term, but it works much better for the moment.

To deal with this for Paste, I even asked Tavis to put a Cheetah package 
on the Cheese Shop page, but since the SF link is longer easy_install 
prefers it :(

-- 
Ian Bicking  |  ianb at colorstudy.com  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org