Re: re-organising Emacs FTP

[Phillip Lord]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>> Thoughts?
>
> I don't really have an opinion, but for the liveliness of the
> discussion, I'll propose some alternatives:
>
> - Move all but the latest to a subdirectory `old`.
> - Add a symlink to the latest with a name such that it comes first in
>   the list.
>   Since the sort is "alphabetical" based on ASCII, there aren't many
>   chars that get sorted before "-" so I'm not sure which would be the
>   best choice in this regard.
>
> The problem I see with your proposal is that the latest releases as well
> as the `latest` link will still appear last,


Yes, I saw that as a problem. We could perhaps rename "emacs" to
"xemacs", then it will always appear after "latest". What do you think?

I quite like the idea of "old", but it has two problems. First, it means
links will change routinely as new releases appear; while this would at
least be predictable, it might still cause issues. Second, as far as I
can tell, the FTP Upload directives do not have a "move" option, so
practically, this is a pain to achieve.

Having directories would at least reduce the problem, in that the last
would be only a few places down the directory listing. Other
possibilities would be to use "current" rather than "latest". Or, get
the ftp.gnu.org to show symlinks first.

I'd like to have a symlink there anyway, because it would mean the
Windows version of Emacs could notify people when updates are available.

Phil