[RFC] hgweb: ease download of binary files

[Christian Ebert]

* Ted Pavlic on Wednesday, April 09, 2008 at 16:27:57 -0400
>> Already with Mercurial it was quite tricky, and I think I'll be
>> stuck with 0.9.4 for quite some time on the server -- on the flip
>> side, I've got branchview working, hehe.
> 
> Keep in mind that mercurial can be installed in your home directory on 
> the server. E.g.:
> 
> make all
> make install-home

Not only in mind, also on server ;) But I'm not allowed to
compile the C modules on the server. By chance I found out that
<http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/MercurialOnSourceforge>
(with Fedora Core, I believe) works on my server -- but only up
to 0.9.4 that Brendan made available. 0.9.5 is the latest there,
and it failed the last times I tried.

> Just a thought...

Still thanks for the input, and if you come up with other ideas
...

> Regarding LaTeX, you still wouldn't have to source control all of that 
> LaTeX build support (classes and styles, etc.). You just have to set 
> your TEXINPUTS to look somewhere else.

But sometimes packages are not entirely backwards compatible in
case they are not standard ones. pdfTeX itself changes etc. with
sometimes slight changes in the result.

I don't mind using new features, and adapt the sources to what I
consider improvements. Still I want some results documented. And
even if I abuse Hg, this works fine for my needs. As Peter said,
the only thing I wanted was a more obvious "button" for "raw", or
an extra one, for binary files. -- And issue1079 fixed, I
proposed a patch for that.

Apart from that, everything works fine, even for
non-computer-savvy people; if they have Adobe Reader installed,
the pdf even displays in their browser (they wouldn't use a text
browser ;) ).

> In fact, you could use software (like Hudson) on your *OWN* machine to 
> continuously build your PDF and then push it onto your server periodically.
> 
> OR, if you want to be a little more low-tech, you could setup a little 
> script. Every time you're ready to merge heads in your central 
> repository, build your PDF and put the date and changeset ID (e.g., 
> 69d51f99ddb2...) in the filename,

I have them in the source file, that's what I wrote the keyword
extension for ;)

> and put all of those files in one 
> directory. If they're sorted by date, you can easily go to past 
> revisions. You could just display the directory on the webserver (turn 
> Indexes on, like an FTP directory).

But I have a wonderful revision control system ;)

Thanks for your input.

c
-- 
Patch queue to improve Mercurial's handling of non-ascii chars in mails:
<http://www.blacktrash.org/hg/hg-mail-mq/>
Mercurial crew repo, with mail improvement patch queue applied:
<http://www.blacktrash.org/hg/hg-crew-mq/>