Published download links must not break.

[stevenmilton]

--------------------------------------
This file used to exist:

http ://www. imagemagick.org/download/ImageMagick-6.8.7-0.tar.gz

Then it moved to to the /legacy/ directory.
Which is fine (not really fine, since it breaks links, but I made a workaround for it),
except for the fact that the file name changed from :

ImageMagick-6.8.7-0.tar.gz
to
ImageMagick-6.8.7-10.tar.gz

Note the change from -0 to -10.

Why this change?
It breaks my automated deploys.
It is bad enough that the links break with every version change in ImageMagick (things move into the legacy/ directory),
and now this?

Can you bring some sanity to this "I don't care about links breaking" business?

[fmw42]

You misunderstand how IM revisions are made. Each time a revision is published it gets a new minor number and the older ones are moved to legacy directory. Once the minor number reaches -10, the next higher revision number is incremented and the minor number is reset to -0 for the next revision. This how IM revisions have been done since the beginning and is standard for most other software.

[stevenmilton]

Thanks for the explanation.

This how IM revisions have been done since the beginning

That's just too bad that you are still using this broken system and not improved it.

and is standard for most other software.

Though I have not seen elsewhere it is standard practice.

It makes things infinitely difficult when trying to automate server software installation.

[fmw42]

I do not agree that the "system" is broken. Lots of software have version numbers with it and the versions change when there is an update. Why is this broken in your opinion.

I am just a user and it seems fine to me.

[njdoyle]

I'll elaborate on this pain. I have a script that automates an install of ImageMagick. This script fetches a particular known version of ImageMagick source, builds the source, installs it on the local machine.

It is important that I point to a particular known version of ImageMagick in case I need to maintain patches and to ensure consistent functionality over a number of machines.

The problem is that if I want to link to today's latest published version of the source and then update the scripts on my own time schedule to the next release the link I used in my script becomes broken because it was moved to the 'legacy' directory. This means I periodically have to update my scripts without notice. Deployment schedules can make this difficult or impossible.

To make things more problematic, dash releases aren't held around anywhere, I can't even go to my scripts and update the link. Dash versions have, in the past, broken locally maintained patches so updating to them blindly isn't always possible.

There is no consistent place to grab a known recent versions of ImageMagick source unless you want people hitting your SVN repo frequently.