[asterisk-dev] Permalinks including latest RC releases

[asterisk at phreaknet.org]

I brought this up at one point prior to the GitHub migration, and it was 
tabled at the time until post-migration. I was discussing again with 
George in the past couple weeks, but at some point the list got dropped 
out of that so I wanted to bring that back onto the list.

What I'd requested at the time was a link similar to 
asterisk-20-current, for example, on the downloads server, that is 
inclusive of release candidates. -current excludes them, for good 
reason, but a link that included these would make it easier for release 
candidates to be deployed and by extension tested. A while back, Josh 
put out a post encouraging people to try out release candidates[1]. It 
would be significantly easier for people to try out release candidates 
if there were static links that would pull the latest RC if one was 
currently out, and otherwise the latest release as -current currently does.

Recapping George's concern with this was that people might download this 
stable/RC combo not realizing that it might link to a release candidates 
at times. I feel that giving it a sufficiently descriptive name, like 
asterisk-20-unstable or something like should make it clear enough that 
it's probably not what people want unless they're deliberately looking 
for that.

George had suggested a permalink that only linked to RCs when they were 
available. I don't like this idea, because then it's not a universal 
permalink, which was the entire point of my original request. Currently, 
if somebody wants to pull down a release candidate in the script, the 
release candidate name needs to be hardcoded somewhere. Hardcoding that 
a release candidate currently exists, even if the link didn't change, is 
no less problematic and doesn't help very much. It would really need to 
be a single link that works at all times, I think, to be useful, so that 
automated tools don't need to do any thinking and can just pull 
something down.

One major problem with the other proposals is the links are transient, 
so as soon as the official release candidate comes out, the links to the 
release candidates disappear and anything relying on that breaks 
immediately. There are workarounds for this, but all of them end up 
wasting somebody's time on a regular basis.

TL;DR is it would great if there was a link like 
asterisk-20-latest-unstable or something that always pointed to latest 
20 tarball, regardless of whether it's a regular or release candidate 
release. I don't care what the name is personally, as long as it exists, 
so as a sufficiently scary name seems like it should dissuade casual 
browsers from downloading it accidentally, and that's the only concern 
I've seen raised thus far.

With Asterisk 21 rc already out, is this something that could be added 
in some kind of permalink form, to allow for broader testing? It would 
be a win win situation since Sangoma would benefit from more people 
trying release candidates, and this would facilitate that. There are 
many cases where I think if downloading a release candidate were as easy 
and predictable as downloading the -current tarball, it would be done, 
and actually streamline other things in the process.

Another thought: since this would be a new link that didn't exist 
before, rather than symlinking, it could also 302 redirect to the latest 
GitHub tarball (if that were easy to do... I know those links aren't 
predictable). That would probably save a little bandwidth.

Thanks!

[1] https://www.asterisk.org/take-a-look-at-release-candidates/