Re: High time to think about releasing 22.0

Malcolm> I'll second this problem. My POE sits behind a proxy Malcolm> that requires authentication so I have t manually Malcolm> download packages as well. Could wget be used as an Malcolm> alternative transport? Well, here's what I had in mind. Break the package-get stuff into two parts, the package-and-archive-finding code, and the transports. Add some data to the package-get-base database so that a dispatch function could be written. Eg, specify archive locations as URLs and dispatch on the schema. Write transports to get the remote file and put it in a known place, then use standard local facilities (eg cp or mv, or tar --file=...) to do the unpacking. KNOWN-PLACE, of course, is a customize-able variable. Have a user configurable variable that associates transport schema (eg, ftp, http, scp, 6250bpi tape) to transports (wget, wget, TRAMP, Federal Express). The dispatch function looks up the desired transport and calls it. The transport API would be something like (transport REMOTE-FILE LOCAL-FILE &rest OPTIONAL-TRANSPORT-PARAMETERS). I think we be golden at this point, just need somebody to implement. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.