re-rolling PDFs and HTML archives of version "1.6" of book withot changing file names

[C. Michael Pilato]

On 10/31/2011 02:53 PM, Lev Serebryakov wrote:
> Hello, C..
> You wrote 31 октября 2011 г., 21:22:40:
> 
>> I'm not a FreeBSD user, so I confess ignorance of the types of problems that
>> your users are seeing.  Where do size and checksum comparisons and
>> validations come into play in the process of viewing documentation?
>   When user installs port from sources (or build server builds binary
> package for users, who prefer to install pre-build packages), system
> download all needed distribution files (sources, documentation, etc.
> -- it depends on software in question, of course) and compare sizes and
> SHA256 checksums of downloading files with recorded in FreeBSD
> software database ("ports system") to ensure, that:
>   (a) there is no download errors
>   (b) files are no hijacked (as hijacked sources could contain
>       backdoors, etc).
> 
>   Documentation (if it is not included in source tarball) is
> downloaded & checked as any other source files. There is no special
> exclusions/exceptions for documentation.
> 
>   So, if user wants to install subversion AND subversion book (book is
> optional, as many experienced users don't need it), book files (PDF
> and tatball with HTML version) are downloaded and checked.

I see.

We don't maintain permanent, immutable versions of the book because there's
always some improvement that needs to be made.  And we don't keep every
build that results from those changes because we don't need to -- they can
always be regenerated from our versioned XML source files.

But I fail to see why this problem is unique to svnbook.  The Subversion
project itself does not produce binary artifacts -- just a source tarball.
So presumably there is a FreeBSD build server or build artifact library that
contains binary builds of Subversion which are versioned to accommodate
users with differing pedigrees of FreeBSD installed.  Could such a system
not also house versioned drops of the Subversion book HTML/PDF artifacts,
and your Subversion port be configured to consult *that* system (instead of
the svnbook.org website) for those bits?

-- 
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato at red-bean.com> | http://cmpilato.blogspot.com/