[Pkg-isocodes-devel] Re: iso-codes releases

[Tobias Toedter]

On Tuesday 31 October 2006 17:04, Alastair McKinstry wrote:
> Elijah Newren wrote:
> > Hi Alastair,
> >
> > The README file in iso-codes seems to suggest you're the one to
> > contact.  If that's not correct, I hope you can point me to the right
> > place.  As far as I can tell, it appears that the master (and only?)
> > download location for iso-codes is
> > ftp://pkg-isocodes.alioth.debian.org/pub/pkg-isocodes/.
> > Unfortunately, there appears to be a policy in place to delete old
> > releases when sending out new ones, which causes problems for people
> > trying to build GNOME.  Is there any way we could get a more permanent
> > download location for iso-codes tarballs?
[...]
> Thanks for pointing this out. Yes, we haven't been keeping old copies on
> the ftp site;
> fortunately they are in Subversion, so I can build them.
>
> I plan to keep the XML schema stable, and the data supplied stable.
> While they have
> had a 0. version code until now, it is possibly a good time to think
> about doing 1. releases,
> and calling the schema stable.

I agree that the XML schema has been stable for quite some time now. It 
seems that we can easily integrate translations and ISO code changes into 
the data without touching the schema. So yes, let's switch over to 1. 
releases.

> One of the points of iso-codes is that it becomes possible (once the
> schema is stable; it
> hasn't changed in many releases, with no changes planned) to update the
> dataset while
> preserving code compatability; ie. the country code for a country
> changes, or more
> translations in language xx become available mean a new release of
> iso-codes 1.x, but
> Gnome 2.14 or whatever can still build against it. Hence rather than
> hard-code building
> Gnome 2.17 against iso-codes 0.65 , etc. it should be built against
> iso-codes 1-latest.tar.gz;
> which would be a symlink to 1.65.tar.gz.

I like the idea of having a symlink which points to the latest available 
version. I don't know if this is helping the GNOME people, though. However, 
it should not be a problem to leave old releases of iso-codes on the 
server, instead of deleting them.

Elijah, I'm sorry that you've had trouble with this, I guess that we just 
did not think enough about possible problems when removing releases. So 
from now on, we will provide a permanent download location for previous 
releases.

Regards,
Tobias

-- 
Tobias Toedter   | I used to be indecisive, now I'm not sure.
Hamburg, Germany |
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