Re: tarball URL conventions and sptools

I wrote:
> I suggest adding more information to slashpackage/list.html.
> For example:
> <li><a href="http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html">admin/daemontools</a><!-- tardir: daemontools/ -->
> <li><a href="http://multivac.cwru.edu/sptools/">admin/sptools</a>:manage /package installations<!-- tardir: releases/ -->

Well, this hasn't happened.  Maybe a more distributed approach is all
we can get: each package author can put URLs in package/* files.  This
won't help for the first installation of a package, but upgrades will
be fully automatable.  So we could have:

$ cat /package/admin/sptools/package/url-src
http://multivac.cwru.edu./sptools/releases/sptools-%{VERSION}.tar.bz2
$ cat /package/admin/sptools/package/url-src-latest
http://multivac.cwru.edu./sptools/latest-version.txt

Programs using url-src would substitute the appropriate version to get
the tarball they're looking for.  ("%" in URLs introduces two-digit
hex codes, so "%" followed by non-hex-digits won't conflict with any
existing valid use of "%" in URLs.)

Programs could use url-src-latest to discover the latest version (and
then perhaps download it via url-src).  This assumes a well-ordering
of versions, though - we could instead somehow accommodate separate
branches ("stable", "beta", etc.).

Comments?  Would other package authors provide this information in
their future tarballs?  Would other tool authors prefer a different
format?


paul