[Slackbuilds-users] Serious regression on Github archive URLs

[Benjamin Trigona-Harany]

On Saturday, 18 August 2018 02:36:49 PDT David Spencer wrote:
> Hey folks,
> 
> Github has just broken the download of about 1000 of our SlackBuilds.
> 
> If you get problems downloading with wget, or curl, or sbopkg, there are
> 2 things you can do:
> 
> (1) Download manually with a browser -- this still seems to work; or

If you are logged into GitHub that is ...

> (2) Visit sbosrcarch at http://slackware.uk/sbosrcarch/by-name/
>

(3) Hack it
Here's a terrible work-around: GitHub is still redirecting our SBo URLs 
correctly, but only if you are authenticated.

By inspecting your browser's http traffic with GitHub, you could grab your 
cookie and add it as a line to .wgetrc, giving something like:
header=Cookie: logged_in=yes; user_session=xxx; __Host-
user_session_same_site=xxx; dotcom_user=bosth; _gh_sess=xxx

I don't actually suggest doing this since using wget with any other website 
will be sharing your session via HTTP headers. You could probably put your 
GitHub username and password in .wgetrc but that's an even worse idea?

> Below is the text of a grumpy email I just sent to Github support.
> 
> Have a great day everybody!
> -D.
> 
> 
> -----------------------------------------
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Within the last 24 hours, for every repo on Github, archive URLS of the form
> 
>   https://github.com/<project>/<repo>/archive/<tag>/<repo>-<tag>.tar.gz
> 
> have stopped working. They now return 404 from within
> codeload.github.com even though the github.com front end still accepts
> them as valid.
> 
> I've attached a log for a typical test case:
> 
>   https://github.com/geopython/OWSLib/archive/0.16.0/OWSLib-0.16.0.tar.gz
> 
> Strangely, this works for manual downloads within some browsers, but it
> is a serious regression that this suddenly no longer works with
> scriptable downloaders like curl and wget.
> 
> As far as we can determine, every repo in Github is affected.
> 
> Please advise.
> 
> -----------------------------------------