[Mingw-cross-env-list] Broken Links

[Daniel Stonier]

I've just started using mingw_cross, so forgive me for being a bit
naive if doing so.

I mentioned in a previous email, that I'd like to use mingw_cross as a
cross-compiling base for RoS
(http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/software/ros-platform). I've got
this set up now and starting to get users. However - in under a month,
two broken download links (and I see the last version upgrade was also
due to a broken link) have meant that the stable mingw-2.18 release is
starting to look unusable. And I imagine this problem will grow with
increasing frequency as more packages are being added to mingw_cross
every week.

Currently the advised solution I see on email is just use the
development branch. Practically, that doesn't work either - for a
single user its ok and they can deal with the problems. But I need to
be able to know that all our users are on the same code base (makes it
easier to resolve problems) and I can't afford to deal with possibly
even more problems that are always inevitable in a development branch
(e.g. libpng in the development branch is also broken - there's a
typo).

So, what's a practical way of dealing with this? Possibly:

1) Bugfix broken download links in the stable release as soon as they
happen rather than just pointing people to the development branch.
2) Have a repository for mingw that holds sources for packages that mingw uses.
3) I create binary snapshots for my users (hack because its only a
partial solution as I can't do for all platforms and I don't know how
many packages my users will want/need).

Can we find a practical resolution to make this better?

Regards,
Daniel Stonier.