Complaint: libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2 (and others) changed on mirrors

["Shaddy Baddah" <shaddy_baddah at hotmail dot com>]

Hi,

Whilst I am appreciative of the work that goes into making the Cygwin 
packages public, when something obviously against convention is done, I feel 
it is necessary to let the maintainers know that they have inconvenienced at 
least one user.

I think it is safe to say that, when you publish any package file, any one 
who downloads that file should be relatively assured that it is never going 
to be re-published by the same name as a changed file. The naming convention 
shows that the maintainers are cognizant of this, by introducing the last 
hyphenated build no. for any version (e.g. 
libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2 is v2.2.2, Cygwin build 1).

However, I have run into problems with the Cygwin setup, against the latest 
published setup.ini, complaining that my cached 
libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2 file is of incorrect size:

<SNIP>
INVALID PACKAGE: 
file://H:\cygwin_netrelease/release/X11/fontconfig/libfontconfig-devel/libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2 - 
Size mismatch: Ini-file: 94226 != On-disk: 94205
2005/03/28 00:16:11 mbox fatal: Fatal Error: Uncaught Exception
Thread: DialogProc
Type: 9Exception
Message: Package validation failure for 
file://H:\cygwin_netrelease/release/X11/fontconfig/libfontconfig-devel/libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2
AppErrNo: 1
2005/03/28 00:30:58 Ending cygwin install
</SNIP>

I checked my tar file with an ls -l 
/cygdrive/h/cygwin_netrelease/release/X11/fontconfig/libfontconfig-devel/libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2 
and tar -tjvf 
/cygdrive/h/cygwin_netrelease/release/X11/fontconfig/libfontconfig-devel/libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2 
| head -1, and whilst it confirmed that the size was indeed inconsistent 
with the ini file, I encountered no errors on the tar:
<SNIP>
shaddy@swing ~
$ ls -l 
/cygdrive/h/cygwin_netrelease/release/X11/fontconfig/libfontconfig-devel/libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 shaddy None 94205 Nov  7  2004 
/cygdrive/h/cygwin_netrelease/release/X11/fontconfig/libfontconfig-devel/libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2

shaddy@swing ~
$ tar -tjvf 
/cygdrive/h/cygwin_netrelease/release/X11/fontconfig/libfontconfig-devel/libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2 
| head -1
drwxrwxrwx harold/None       0 2004-03-11 11:37:44 usr/lib/

shaddy@swing ~
$
</SNIP>

I checked the file on my local mirror, and indeed found that does match the 
claimed ini size. I downloaded the file over the old one, and retried my 
Cygwin setup. This time, I encountered no problem with the 
libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2, but now am running into the same 
problem with libfreetype2-devel-2.1.5-1.tar.bz2. I am at this point now, and 
will have to repeat the process... but I am not thrilled with what has 
happened.

Executing the same on the downloaded version of 
libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2, I got:
<SNIP>
shaddy@swing ~
$ ls -l 
/cygdrive/h/cygwin_netrelease/release/X11/fontconfig/libfontconfig-devel/libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2
-r--r--r--  1 shaddy None 94226 Mar 28 00:31 
/cygdrive/h/cygwin_netrelease/release/X11/fontconfig/libfontconfig-devel/libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2
shaddy@swing ~
$ tar -tjvf 
/cygdrive/h/cygwin_netrelease/release/X11/fontconfig/libfontconfig-devel/libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2 
| head -1
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2004-11-12 04:54:53 usr/
shaddy@swing ~
$
</SNIP>

So, I think it is obvious that there was a slight problem with the 
ownership, and the apparent minor severity of the problem was deemed 
acceptable to circumvent the convention, and overwrite the build 1 of 
v2.2.1.

Obviously, this is not a disastrous problem, which I can recover from 
manually (still ongoing at the time of writing. Let's see what happens when 
I get past libfreetype2-devel)... but I feel it was unnecessary. In my 
opinion, you should just have made a build 2.

Anyway, I hope it's food for thought. Otherwise, you have my gratitude for 
the 99.9% of the work that you do with excellence.

Regards,
Shaddy