[GNC-dev] Sourceforge gnucash-docs-3.7.tar.gz incomplete

[John Ralls]

> On Oct 19, 2019, at 2:14 PM, Phil Diacono <satphil at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I can confirm that the build from current git with cmake succeeds as does the
> subsequent "make" and "make install".
> 
> I hope the following is seen as constructive and in the big picture a very
> minor criticism as I have huge admiration for the gnucash development team's
> dedication, productivity and talent. But (you knew there was a "but" coming,
> didn't you) this raises a couple of points:
> 
> -1- what is a release? If sourceforge and github both claim to have the
> gnucash-docs 3.7 source tarball but they are of different sizes and one
> works and one doesn't, then it seems to my naïve user perspective there have
> been two releases but both given the same name.
> 
> -2- in both locations (sourceforge and github) from where I downloaded the
> tarballs, there was no obvious checksum (md5sum or sha256sum) to confirm the
> integrity of the tarball, in case one had been corrupted (however unlikely
> given both gzip and tar were happy with it). Apologies if I didn't spot it. 
> 
> Keep up the great work, users like me love your product. Thanks very much.

1. A release is a commit tagged with a version number and has an associated release page on https://github.com/gnucash/Gnucash. Documentation releases are done simultaneously with GnuCash releases and the release tarball is included as a download with the rest of the release downloads on the GitHub GnuCash release page and on SourceForge. For a little more than a year I've been putting the documentation tarball in the same SourceForge directory as the other downloads instead of in a separate gnucash-docs directory. Github also automatically generates tarballs from tags and those are different from the release ones: The release tarballs have been partially processed to combine the various pieces into a single XML file for each translation of each of Help and The Tutorial and Concepts Guide; the Github tarballs aren't preprocessed, they're the same files you'd get if you did a git clone.

2. Sha-256 sums for all of the release downloads are in the Readme in the SourceForge release directory (e.g. https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files/gnucash%20%28stable%29/3.7/) and in the release announcement posted to GitHub (https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/releases), in the release news on the website (https://www.gnucash.org/news.phtml) and in the release announcements sent to gnucash-announce, gnucash-devel, and gnucash-user. AFAICT Github doesn't provide hashes of its automatically-generated tarballs.

Regards,
John Ralls