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DownloadingDownloadingPosted Mar 8, 2010 15:21 UTC (Mon) by tseaver (subscriber, #1544)In reply to: Downloading by epa Parent article: Mercurial 1.5 released
> surely the canonical way to get the software these days is to pull a particular revision from the upstream repository
Surely not. A tarball of a specific release is vastly more useful for nearly any purpose other than ongoing development. Most consumers of software are not developers (or at least are not developers of everything they consume).
When was the last time you built everything on your system from sources you pulled from a VCS?
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Downloading Posted Mar 10, 2010 12:00 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
Why is a tarball more useful? More familiar, yes. But apart from 'we have always done it that way', what is the advantage to getting a certain collection of bits by uncompressing a tarball, compared to getting exactly the same bits using a pull command? Indeed, pulling a particular SHA-signed revision gives you a much stronger guarantee you're getting the right thing rather than some trojaned version.
Downloading Posted Mar 10, 2010 16:44 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Getting the sources as a tarball: Click link in web browser. Save tarball. Unpack tarball with archiver. Getting the sources of a VCS tool with a VCS tool: Egg, meet chicken. Getting the sources of a general app whose VCS system isn't one I have the tool for installed on my system: Why should I install a VCS tool I'm not actually going to use for version control just so I can build this app's supposed production-quality release from source? Slurping from VCS is fine for developers, and for users wanting to run the bleeding-edge it-compiles-on-my-machine-honest-guv versions of things, but for people wanting to install the latest production version of something that their distro doesn't have a recent package of and the authors don't package as binaries, I think "tarball" wins over "slurp from VCS" every time.
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