On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 04:17:07PM +0100, Marcus Rueckert wrote:
but it i will make the redirector harder. we aim for a redirector that doesnt need local file access anymore but works with a sql db as backend. to check what file is currently behind the symlink we would need to read the link and than lookup the path to the real file in the DB. of course we could transfer that symlink -> file mapping into the DB aswell. but that would complicate the query. and for performance reasons i would like to keep the query count per request low (ideally 1, most likely it will be 2)
I agree that performance of the redirector might be an issue to consider here. But not having persistent URLs in my opinion is a usability problem that outweighs these performance issues here. Actually I would prefer not having a redirector over not having persistent links.
Furthermore i am more in favor of using package managers for the installation step. rpm -i should be a very rare exception. so it would be better to point to some doc, that explains to integrate the repo into your favorite package manager.
This sounds more clean from the perspective of maintaining exactly one type of systems but it makes projects websites that provide packages for various platforms extremely confusing if for each and every platform a link to different documentation is provided. It is just more simple for projects websites and their users just to _link_ to binaries for various systems than explaining all types of package management. I think most projects that want to provide binary RPMs for their tool actually want to provide binary RPMs for their tool and not write documentation for all sorts of package managers traveling around. And linking to generic documentation confuses most users providing a huge load of the project's help list. Thus if you make things to complicated for this scenario the result will just be that many project administrators might just stop using the build service again because from their perspective it just becomes a maintainance hell. BTW: You should not underestimate the number of people using the rpm command line because it just saves you a lot of time of your life in many situations. Robert -- Robert Schiele Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@gmail.com "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur."