[ANNOUNCE] Re: OfflineIMAP v6.3.4-rc1 released

[Nicolas Sebrecht]

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 09:54:33PM +0200, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> 
> Hi Nicolas,
> 
> 2011/5/16 Nicolas Sebrecht <nicolas.s-dev at laposte.net>:
> > OfflineIMAP v6.3.4-rc1 is out.
> >
> [....]
> > As usual, we ask our users to test this release as much as possible, especially
> > the SQL backend. Have fun!
> 
> I've been a happy user of offlineimap for a while now, and subscribed
> to this mailing list a few weeks ago, and looked at how it was
> packaged in fedora. And I must say that it was quite difficult to find
> the tarball for the 6.3.3 release when I didn't know where to look at
> it. Would it be possible to give more details about where to find
> tarballs in the README, and to link to the latest tarball in the
> release announcements?

I guess you're talking about the github download link at 

  https://github.com/nicolas33/offlineimap/downloads

It's up to anyone to send a patch to update the documentation in this
way. :-)

But users have to know we _DON'T_ provide tarballs. The installation
procedure from sources is using Git (it's in recent documentation).

FMHO, I think the amount of users installing from sources is not worth
the time supporting tarballs since they can use Git.

> Another problems I've had with the released tarballs is that they are
> not really convenient to use in a .spec file because of the various
> prefix/suffix appended to the "offlineimap" name, ie the one for this
> release has a nicolas33 prefix, a g2d31abd suffix,

I've raised this issue to the Github maintainers. The answer was that
the download tag feature is not supposed to be a replacement for
official packaging on releases. It sounds false to me but here we are.

>                                                    and the directory
> inside the tarball has another hash-like suffix.

This is pretty easy to fix in a script. :-)

>                                                  It would be more
> convenient if the tarball was just offlineimap-6.3.4-rc1.tar.bz2 and
> the directory inside was offlineimap-6.4.1-rc1/ Actually, the fedora
> packager regenerates the tarball so that it uses this layout since it
> makes life much easier, but this causes issues imo :)

I didn't know some people maintain tarballs outside. If people are so
annoyed, I would expect someone do this work public for others. I would
be pleased to add a link (or merge a patch) to add a public URL where
from others could download packages.

-- 
Nicolas Sebrecht