is there a 'latest' download link? (q at RacketCon)

[spdegabrielle]

e.g.

a link something like https://download.racket-lang.org/releases/current/installers/racket-current-x86_64-win32-cs.exe

that redirects to the 'current' release: https://download.racket-lang.org/releases/8.14/installers/racket-8.14-x86_64-win32-cs.exe

May already exist?

[sorawee]

I don't think there's a link for that, but what @Bogdanp did in Bogdanp/setup-racket#17 is to first look up the file http://download.racket-lang.org/version.txt, and fetch the stable field, resolving to the actual version that users want.

I agree a more direct way would be better.

[jbclements]

I've done a bit of research, and it looks like the scripts that we're still running try to create a soft link from recent to the most recent version, in the installers directory. It could be that rsync falls over on the soft link, but I actually don't see the recent directory in the staging directories, so that's not the full story. I'm also not sure that recent is the best name for this, though @elibarzilay may have a good reason for having picked it? If that was even his/your choice? (Hi, Eli!) I will try to investigate what's failing when we get to this point in the release process for 8.15.

[elibarzilay]

(Good morning!)

Heh, I'm surprised that that stuff is still used... I don't think that I had any reason to choose one name over another, other than "there weren't any conventions at the time"...¹

I think that "latest" is the popular choice now, more than "current", but 🤷.

BTW, symlinks can be a problem with random pipelines with a windows machine being the obvious weak link, and rsync can be dangerous in making assumptions, so a simple tar might work better. (Or even better, either recreate an explicit (temporary) redirection for the symlink, or if there's more, then write some code that translates all of them to redirects.)

Footnotes

1. Something that I find myself saying more frequently. Every few semesters I talk about Basic in the Commodore 64 days, and I tell students that it was before small caps were invented... ↩

[racket-discourse-github-bot]

This issue has been mentioned on Racket Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://racket.discourse.group/t/best-name-for-most-recent-version-url/3289/9