Subject:
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Re: Request change to ptreleases.cgi
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev
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Date:
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Tue, 20 Jul 2004 22:35:07 GMT
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Viewed:
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1453 times
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In lugnet.cad.dev, Dan Boger wrote:
> I always thought it should emit XML, which would make it really easy to
> add more info (like what you're suggesting) without affecting backwards
> compatibility. Maybe it's not too late to do that. From looking at the
> logs from the last few days, there's only one IP that is trying to hit
> it - could it be yours, perhaps? ever 90 seconds or so, from a rr.com
> domain?
Yes, that would be me. I had a messed up bug in my HTTP download code that took
me a long time to track down. (Note that the bug didn't cause the unusally
large number of downloads of the file; tracking down the bug did.)
In general, I'm not a big fan of XML, but in this particular instance, you make
a very good point about future expansion while maintaining backward
compatibility. Given the simplicity of the data, we could also just go with ini
format. It's a lot easier to parse by hand, and I'm not about to use
Microsoft's XML parser. Something like so:
[Updates]
2004-02
2004-01
2003-03
<list continues>
[Full]
date=2004-04-24
ExeFile=http://www.ldraw.org/library/updates/complete.exe
ExeFileSize=123456
ZipFile=http://www.ldraw.org/library/updates/complete.zip
ZipFileSize=123400
[2004-02]
date=2004-04-24
ExeFile=http://www.ldraw.org/library/updates/lcad0402.exe
ExeFileSize=12345
ZipFile=http://www.ldraw.org/library/updates/lcad0402.zip
ZipFileSize=12300
[2004-01]
<File continues>
Hopefully you get the idea. XML gives you arbitrary nesting, but I don't think
we would ever need more nesting in our data.
> So it seems that we can make the change... Again, I'd push for
> switching to a complete XML interface, perhaps with a mode where you can
> just select which columns you want to get in a tab-delimited format,
> just to make it easier for languages that don't deal easily with XML.
That would be a cool feature.
> I would even volunteer to make the change, given Steve's blessing.
>
> Oh - and reporting the file size is a very good idea. Hitting the cgi
> every 90 seconds (in production, not during development) is not such a
> good idea. :)
Sorry about that. I strongly considered copying the contents somewhere else,
but since I thought part of my problem was with the chunked download that
ldraw.org was providing, I didn't. And, for what it's worth, each one of those
downloads was manually started by me telling my program to do so; it wasn't
automated.
Fair warning, though: I'll eventually have to debug my actual update code, and I
don't really see any good way to do that other than to actually download the
real files. If it seems to be taking too long, I'll copy the files and update
my copy of the releases file to point to a different web server.
--Travis
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Request change to ptreleases.cgi
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| (...) I always thought it should emit XML, which would make it really easy to add more info (like what you're suggesting) without affecting backwards compatibility. Maybe it's not too late to do that. From looking at the logs from the last few days, (...) (20 years ago, 20-Jul-04, to lugnet.cad.dev)
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