Re: SourceForge's download links

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From: Smylers
Subject: Re: SourceForge's download links
Date: 22:47 on 03 Feb 2005
Leon Brocard writes:

> ...if I click on a file on SourceForget, I get a page saying "You are
> requesting file: /foobar/quux-1.2.0.tar.gz. Please select a mirror".
> [much snippage] Of course, I almost never want to download to the
> computer my browser is running on, so I abort that, copy the link and
> use wget.

It's even worse than that if you forget the system.  I tend to remember
how irritating SourceForge is in general enough to avoid it where
possible, but that only means I get tripped up by the same thing
whenever encountering it is unavoidable.

I tend to start by using my browser to copy to the clipboard the URL
from the link that's apparently to the filename, then use wget to
download URL to the server I actually want the file on.

That results in the HTML 'pick a mirror' page being downloaded to the
server, with a .tar.gz extension.  I then spend some time wondering why
tar can't process the file, before examining it in an editor, realizing
what's happened, and trying to click 'Undo Close Tab' enough times in my
browser to get back to the page that had it on, which I closed while the
file was downloading.

> ps I did mean it about the previous hate,

Good!

> but I'm slowly recovering

That's a shame -- I was hoping that it might've been sufficiently
contagious that we'd all give up on computers ...

Smylers

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