Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:45:28 +0100 From: Anton Berezin <tobez@tobez.org> To: perl@freebsd.org Subject: Tip of the day: version-independent location of a CPAN distribution's Changes file Message-ID: <20071220114528.GA40670@heechee.tobez.org>
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Hi, Some time ago several people (most notably skv@) ranted about including a list of changes or a link to such list in the commit message for a port update. I thought it was a great idea and started including a link to a CPAN's distribution Changes file in my commits some time ago. What I did not like was that those links looked like this: http://search.cpan.org/src/JESSE/Template-Declare-0.27/Changes FreeBSD's commit messages are preserved in our repository and mail archives forever, for a suitable definition of "forever". On the other hand, CPAN authors are encouraged to clean up old and obsolete versions promptly. Thus there is a discrepancy between expected time of life of the link in the commit message and the link contents. While older CPAN distributions can still be found on http://backpan.cpan.org/, it only provides links to tarballs and not individual files like Changes. Luckily, it turns out that version-less links like http://search.cpan.org/dist/Template-Declare/Changes work just fine, redirecting to the most recent version of the file. This is acceptable, since Changes is expected to be a prepend-only file, so the information the commit message was trying to link to can (almost) always be found there. Cheers, \Anton. -- We're going for 'working' here. 'clean' is for people with skills... -- Flemming Jacobsen
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