Ranting about RDFs and SourceForge

[3FG]

I'm trying to help someone over at RC, and she has a 8820N. Just bought a cable and downloaded the latest RDF distribution, and there is no 8820N RDF. Since she isn't too familiar with this stuff, it isn't easy for her to know that the RDF is missing. Anyway, her logical conclusion is that the 8820N RDF doesn't work with IR8.03, or something.

Now, I know from traffic here that the 8820N was left out of the 1.30 distribution, so I confidently went off to get her a link from the Under Development area, or somewhere. Actually she had a link to the (apparently) appropriate place in SourceForge, but "download" doesn't work.

Here's the only way that I could find to get the RDF file: click on "as text" in the Control Remote repository, select all the text, copy it into a text editor, go back a page in the repository, copy the file name (11781178 (URC-6820N_8820N_10820N).rdf ), do a Save As, paste in the filename, etc. I was able to download the image file directly, and then went through the copy-paste dance for the map file. I zipped that up and posted it in the diagnosis area so she can proceed.

Is there a better way (short of setting up SVN--I have CVS, and most people don't want to do any registering at SF)? If not, I truly hope that we can come up with a way that has RDF files either in a zip distribution or still in the Development Area here.

[mathdon]

I have found that the following method works, though it is definitely not intuitive! Right-click on the version number (not the file name) and select "Save Target As". This will download a file with a .xml extension. Change the extension to ".rdf".

Apparently in the big wide world, a .rdf file is some sort of .xml file, which is why (a) if you click on the version number (the "hint" says this downloads the file) you get "This XML file cannot be displayed", and (b) the download process changes the extension to .xml.

[3FG]

Ok, now I remember you posting about this before. I still don't see how a novice user is going to navigate through this. Maybe its just a transient issue until there is a relatively stable distribution zip file.

[gfb107]

I've discovered a way to make this work better, which i tested only on the 8820N rdf.

I used TortoiseSVN to set the svn:mime-type property to application/octet-stream.
Now the download link works as expected in all the browsers I tried (Chrome, Firefox, Safari for Windows, Internet Explorer 7).

Please give it a try. If this change works for everyone, we can apply the same change to all the rdfs. The tricky part will be remembering to do this for new RDFs.

[The Robman]

I think that is an RDF is not part of the main zip, it should be available in one of the folders here. If that means that we need a 2nd folder for the "ready to go" RDFs, so be it.

It seems to me that there are only 2 or 3 people that actually need SF for the development, but there are thousands who are adversely affected by it.

[xnappo]

I think that is an RDF is not part of the main zip, it should be available in one of the folders here. If that means that we need a 2nd folder for the "ready to go" RDFs, so be it.

It seems to me that there are only 2 or 3 people that actually need SF for the development, but there are thousands who are adversely affected by it.

Greg's fix should fix this issue. Please give it a try. If it does I will fix all of them.

I will say that this particular event happened because I had really intended to do a release last weekend - but then ran into the DeviceAlias issue which I still don't have a good answer for.

In general I do not want this to happen and will try to make the time from a file being removed from the 'in development' section and the release of a new .zip much shorter. Again that was my intention this time and I apologize for the delay.

In case that wasn't enough of a hint... Please help me resolve my dispositions of the DeviceAlias issues!

xnappo

[The Robman]

In case that wasn't enough of a hint... Please help me resolve my dispositions of the DeviceAlias issues!

What help do you need?

[xnappo]

In case that wasn't enough of a hint... Please help me resolve my dispositions of the DeviceAlias issues!

What help do you need?

Well, I listed some dispositions and how to treat the HT aliases, etc... It is not clear how to handle them though. I will post over there again with a summary of what I need.

Thanks,
xnappo

[xnappo]

I've discovered a way to make this work better, which i tested only on the 8820N rdf.

I used TortoiseSVN to set the svn:mime-type property to application/octet-stream.
Now the download link works as expected in all the browsers I tried (Chrome, Firefox, Safari for Windows, Internet Explorer 7).

Greg,

I tried this myself from two computers and two browsers and it does fix the problem.

I will fix all of the RDFs this weekend - if it isn't obvious where to change that setting though, please give me some more details(not on a computer with SVN right now).

xnappo

[gfb107]

Browse to the rdf folder.
Select a bunch of rdfs (or all the rdfs)
Right-click on one of the selected rdfs
Click Tortoise SVN -> Properties
Click New...
In the Property Name: drop down select svn:mime-type
In the Property Value: text area type (or cut-n-paste)

Code: Select all

application/octet-stream

Press OK.

Once you've done that for all the rdfs you want, commit.

[xnappo]

Once you've done that for all the rdfs you want, commit.

Thanks Greg. The download button from the 'Latest' section should now work as expected.

xnappo

P.S. Client side, you can go to 'Settings->General->Edit [SVN Config File]' and uncomment:

Code: Select all

enable-auto-props=yes

Then under [auto-props] add

Code: Select all

*.rdf = svn:mime-type=application/octet-stream

That will at least make it automatically fix and new RDFs you and I add. From what I can tell, unfortunately this needs to be done client-side so we will have to watch for new RDFs from clients that don't have this set.

[mathdon]

P.S. Client side, you can go to 'Settings->General->Edit [SVN Config File]' and uncomment:

Code: Select all

enable-auto-props=yes

Then under [auto-props] add

Code: Select all

*.rdf = svn:mime-type=application/octet-stream

That will at least make it automatically fix any new RDFs you and I add. From what I can tell, unfortunately this needs to be done client-side so we will have to watch for new RDFs from clients that don't have this set.

I too have now made that change, though I don't expect to be doing much, if anything, with committing RDF changes.

[xnappo]

I too have now made that change, though I don't expect to be doing much, if anything, with committing RDF changes.

Thanks Graham,

xnappo