- From: Eric J. Bowman <eric@bisonsystems.net>
- Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2010 12:18:36 -0600
- To: Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>
- Cc: HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
Willy Tarreau wrote: > > it recently happened to me again that some people downloaded an old > deprecated version of some software I authored, installed it in > production and blogged about it with links to the deprecated software. > The link is basically a link to the tgz, such as : > > http://haproxy.1wt.eu/download/1.4/src/haproxy-1.4.8.tar.gz > One solution is to attach a Link header to that response, with rel= alternate pointing to /download/current/src/haproxy-latest.tgz, which when dereferenced returns Location or Content-Location with the version- specific URI of the latest version. If the "user" is something like pkgsrc or ports, you're providing all the information necessary for re-downloading the existing, installed version vs. updating the package tree while preserving the version for later re-downloading, etc. (assuming the agents for such users are updated to grok C-L and Link, or you're redirecting from latest). You're basically stuck with the problem of folks downloading the old version that's been linked to, unless you're willing to disallow access to the old version by redirecting to latest, or download managers react to the rel=alternate by informing the user that there's also haproxy- latest.tgz to consider -- which seems reasonable considering that the act of downloading from a link already requires user interaction where browsers are concerned, presumably wget could be updated to understand rel=alternate with a switch to always ignore/follow/ask. -Eric
Received on Sunday, 3 October 2010 18:19:42 UTC