[Slackbuilds-users] Source code missing for some Slackbuilds scripts

[Luveh Keraph]

Thanks. I was certainly not suggesting to download the sources every time,
but merely to verify that they are available where they are supposed to be
in each case, triggering the email communication only when they are not.
While I acknowledge that doing so every day would be overkill, all the more
so bearing in mind the details that you described about the weekly updates;
doing it once a week would make more sense. I still think that an email
ought to be sent every week for each affected item for as long as the
relevant maintainer won't sort things out for that item.

Another issue is that some Slackbuilds items are multiple versions behind
the current official upstream one, and while there often is a stability
rationale for this it is not uncommon for such a thing to happen because
the maintainers have simply ditched their maintenance responsibilities, as
evidenced by the fact that they don't acknowledge repeated emails on the
issue. What I am proposing would obviously make no difference in such
cases, but it might when the reason why the item is not being properly
upgraded is because the relevant maintainer simply forgot about it - which,
based on some threads in this list, does not seem to be an entirely unusual
occurrence.

On Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 2:43 PM B. Watson <urchlay at slackware.uk> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, 10 Mar 2025, Luveh Keraph wrote:
>
> > Yesterday I was building a bunch of packages in a system to match what I
> have in a separate system. As it happens, a substantial number of them -
> like e.g. calc, makemkv, monitorix,
> > transcode, pari) could not be built simply because the source code to be
> used is not available in the target location any more.
>
> There's a solution for this: the SBo source archive.
>
> https://slackware.uk/sbosrcarch/
>
> slackbuilds.org itself doesn't host sources, so the archive is hosted
> elsewhere. Every time there's an update to the SBo master git branch,
> the new DOWNLOAD and DOWNLOAD_x86_64 files are downloaded and filed in
> the archive trees (by-name and by-md5).
>
> If you use sbopkg, it will automatically use the archive if the
> original URL doesn't work. Also, if you use sbo-maintainer-tools, it
> has a sbodl command that can download sources from the archive (the
> -a option).
>
> > For the most part it is not a big deal, for the new sources can usually
> be found without a problem (things for transcode were a bit more tricky)
> and a simple modification to the
> > corresponding Slackbuilds script gets things built properly. I was
> wondering, however, whether it would be a good idea to add small script to
> the Slackbuilds repository whereby the
> > script attempts to download the source code for each item in Slackbuilds
> once a day every day, and sends a warning email to the maintainer of each
> package.
>
> If someone implements this, I beg of you, keep track of previous
> emails and don't send the maintainer the same email twice. Also, daily
> is a bad idea. Weekly would be better.
>
> This is because the repo only updates weekly, on Friday nights. So if
> a source disappears on Saturday and I get an email about it, I fix the
> build and submit the update... but it won't get merged to the master
> branch until the next Friday. I do *not* want to receive 5 more emails
> that week telling me to update my build, since I already did. If your
> system did that, then I probably would block the emails or file them
> as spam, for my own sanity.
>
> Another issue with your idea... some of the sources are rather
> large. Constantly re-downloading them every day (or even every week)
> might cost us money.
>
> Hard numbers: The sbosrcarch by-name and by-md5 directories are each
> 190GB. Files are hardlinked between the two trees, and outdated files
> are removed from the archive weekly, so this gives a pretty good idea
> of how much source your email script would have to download per run.
>
> 190GB a day would be 5.7 terabytes a month...
>
> Of course your script could just do an HTTP HEAD instead of a
> download. But there are web servers out there that refuse to respond
> to a HEAD request. Plus, it doesn't let the script detect when the
> md5sum is wrong (meaning, the file changed on the server).
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