[RP-PPPoE] ADMIN: Change in download policy for rp-pppoe

[Lee Garrett]

Hi Dianne!

I'm the downstream maintainer of rp-pppoe in Debian. On the Mini-Debconf Berlin 
event I was able to update the package [0], and I noticed that downloading the 
tarball and signature via our packaging tools (namely "gbp import-orig --uscan") 
was broken, which made me find your announcement. First of all, thank you for 
maintaining rp-pppoe! It has served me well for the last two decades.

> I have now added a "prove you're human" interstitial page on the download
> links that appear in https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/rp-pppoe/

That a bit unfortunate, as it breaks my current packaging workflows. Manually 
downloading it is possible, but uncommon, and I've already found two bugs [1][2] 
in our tools that make that workflow difficult (that's on Debian though).

> I'd like to follow up on this.  If you absolutely need an automated
> way to download the RP-PPPoE tarball, you can always use Github, which
> lets you download any tag as a tarball.  For example, the latest release
> of RP-PPPoE can be downloaded as a tarball from:
> 
> https://github.com/dfskoll/rp-pppoe/archive/refs/tags/4.0.tar.gz
> 
> Admittedly, if you use "wget" you'll end up with a file called
> "4.0.tar.gz", but you can rename it or use the -O option to specify
> the destination file.

That is an option, however in this case the GPG signature is lost and there's no 
(automated) way for me to verify the tarball is from you.

It should be easy to host the tarballs with signature files on github.

FYI, I'm not aware of any Debian infrastructure that regular downloads those 
files. There's https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rp-pppoe, but that only downloads 
the overview page once a day to check if there are updates available. Ubuntu 
probably has something similar. But that should be only ~2 requests a day then. 
Nothing on Debian's end should be downloading the actual tarballs.

Greets,
Lee

[0] 
https://tracker.debian.org/news/1531594/accepted-rp-pppoe-40-1-source-into-unstable/
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1072008
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1072013