Re: What is the policy on feed update frequency?

His Sebastien,

the problem with the LibreOffice feed was, that libreoffice.org only provides the most recent version of LibreOffice on their main download server. As soon as they release a new version they delete the old one. Therefore I have now changed the LibreOffice feed to use their "archive" download server which keeps old versions. This means the LibreOffice should no longer break as it did in the past.

Oracle started providing a .tar.gz version of the JRE for Windows starting with Java 8. This made it possible to easily integrate it with Zero Install. I could manually create an archive  for Java 7 and add that to the feed.
Either way, Oracle does not allow deep-links pointing directly to their download servers, so I always need to host a copy of the .tar.gz on 0install.de which so far has limited how often I added updates.

I've just added a feed for the GUI version of 7-zip. Had been sitting in my todo list for a while.

Due to the distributed nature of 0install there is no single authority that decides what gets put into a feed, since anybody can create a feed. The feeds on 0install.de (listed in the Zero Install Catalog GUI by default) are simply the ones I personally have time to maintain.
You can see the history and submit issues to request new feeds here: https://github.com/0install/0install.de-feeds
I have a system in place for automatically updating feeds when new versions of an application are released, but am still looking for suitable HTML/RSS scrapper to trigger the process.

The typical use-case for Zero Install is, while not limited to, mainly power-users and developers that need to use lots of different applications but want to retain control of what gets installed on their machine. It is meant both for one-off uses (just 0launch something when you need it and then forget it) and for building reproducibly environments (e.g. using 0install sync).

Regards
Bastian


-----Original Message-----
From: Sebastien Diot [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Mittwoch, 20. Mai 2015 14:50
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Zero-install-devel] What is the policy on feed update frequency?

After my office PC was re-installed (because it was unbearbaly slow before), I tried to use Zero Install for many free tools I regularly use. I selected LibreOffice, but did not try to use it until now. Unfortunately, it seems LibreOffice was not only updated, but also deleted all old versions, such that it seems no version in the LibreOffice feed is still available for download.
I assume I could work around this by copying the feed and editing it, but if I end up having to do this often, then I have to ask myself if it is not less trouble to install the applications 'normally' once, and be done with it.
Another particular problem I see in my case, is with the selected Java versions. Due to compatibility issues, I still have to use Java 7 at work, and so can neither use the Oracle JRE feed, nor the Ant or Maven or Eclipse feeds, but even if I could use Java 8, I might still be required to use a specific, or at least 'recent', version of Java, to conform to the version we tell our clients to use.
Furthermore, I was wondering why there is a feed for the command-line version of 7-zip, but not for the GUI version. I was in fact surprised that anyone would have a need for the command-line version; 7-Zip is intalled by default on every employee PC here, but nobody uses it from the command-line.
What I want to know is, who decides which feed to offer and when to update which feed, and what are the policies guiding those decisions, and also what are the expected/typical use-cases for using Zero Install? I feel like I fall outside of the scope, although I think that my issues would be shared by many devellopers as well.
Regards,
Sebastien Diot


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