[Firehol-support] Changing official release URL

[Phil Whineray]

Hi

This email is aimed mainly at downstream maintainers: if this will cause
you major headaches, let me know if something can be changed simply or
if I need to reconsider. Otherwise there are a quite a few benefits to
the project.


What's changing?

The new official release URL will be:
  https://github.com/firehol/firehol/releases

which is just the standard github release page; packages will now
be put there automatically by the build system.

The current URL (https://firehol.org/download/firehol/releases/) will
redirect to the github page.

Likewise, https://firehol.org/download/firehol/releases/ will be redirected
to https://github.com/firehol/firehol/releases/latest which resolves
to the most recent tag.

Other sub-URLs will not be redirected and existing files will be left in
place, so published locations should mostly work unchanged.

The automatic, unsigned builds of branches such as master and stable-*
will continue to deploy to https://firehol.org/download/firehol/unsigned
because there is no equivalent location on github.

I'll put the redirects in place on Saturday morning (UTC) and will ensure
any uploads are present in both locations for the following week or two.


Why?

People who find the projects through github always find that releases page,
which by default describes each git tag as a release and offers a source
download. That download contains only the git files, i.e. no configure
script, no pre-built docs etc. which most end-users want.

To combat this we have been including a URL to the official location but
many people seem to miss it. With netdata, Costa manually started adding
the files each time manually.

I have been looking at travis-ci.org integration as a means to build
the files currently created on firehol.org. Travis integration will:

- replace a considerable number of custom scripts with a standard solution
- give project users/maintainers etc. better insight into the build process
- enable automatic upload of files to the github releases page
- reduce load on firehol.org during build (and downloads)

Netdata already uses travis to check commits but with a bit of work I
have been able to fully (and fairly easily) integrate the whole process.


Why now?

The release of firehol 3.1.0 should not be too far away. This version
will do a much better job of honouring the ./configure setup and detected
files. It reorganises a bit how things are installed (versioned directory,
with links to the executables in /sbin).

I figure churning both things around the same time will be marginally
less effort. If you want to see what packaging changes will go into
3.1.0, see here:
  https://github.com/firehol/firehol/pull/128

Regards
Phil