Sourceforge download links unreliable

[trws]

A number of packages, I noticed tmux but there are others, have sourceforge links of the form:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/tmux/tmux/tmux-1.9/tmux-1.9a.tar.gz

These used to work as download links with redirect handling, but now a timestamp appears to be required. This new form appears to work (on wget from a shell):

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/tmux/tmux/tmux-1.9/tmux-1.9a.tar.gz?ts=$(date +%s)&use_mirror=autoselect

Not sure what the best way to address this is, but a url-handler for sourceforge might be in order.

[tgamblin]

@scogland: there are some packages that use other source forge urls -- ones that end in /download. Did you look at those? For example, for tmux, you can navigate to here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tmux/files/tmux/tmux-1.9/

And you can copy a link that looks like this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tmux/files/tmux/tmux-1.9/tmux-1.9a.tar.gz/download

I think that URL will work with Spack and is also stable (and doesn't need their URL annotation crap). Can you see if this fixes things? I am hesitant to include a change for something that tacks weird parameters onto the end of URLs.

I wish there was some crowdsourced place I could go to pay for projects I like to get off of source forge...

[trws]

Unfortunately, that's the problem. That used to work. Now I get an
html file named "download" or "download.html" depending on whether you
use curl -O or wget respectively. Does it still work for you?

Using the same URL in a browser or elinks will follow the delayed
redirect and get the actual file, but I don't know a way to get one of
the basic download programs to handle it. I have some python code
somewhere for invoking an external V8 javascript interpreter to follow
this kind of redirect, but that's a lot heavier and a lot more
invasive...

On 18 Jun 2015, at 0:43, Todd Gamblin wrote:

@scogland: there are some packages that use other source forge urls --
ones that end in /download. Did you look at those? For example, for
tmux, you can navigate to here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tmux/files/tmux/tmux-1.9/

And you can copy a link that looks like this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tmux/files/tmux/tmux-1.9/tmux-1.9a.tar.gz/download

I think that URL will work with Spack and is also stable (and doesn't
need their URL annotation crap). Can you see if this fixes things? I
am hesitant to include a change for something that tacks weird
parameters onto the end of URLs.

I wish there was some crowdsourced place I could go to pay for
projects I like to get off of source forge...

---

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#59 (comment)

[trws]

Closing, this is a configuration issue that needs a completely different solution. For anyone that finds this by searching, check to make sure your ~/.curlrc is not setting the user agent, it causes sourceforge to indirect out the direct-download link and inject adds.