no separate source code tarball download available #2473

on http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.8.1/ there's no source code tarball which i need to get reproducible results on my build-it-yourself distro (package management system is laid out for source tarballs with checksums, not git checkouts)

apparently the linux download has the source included, but also comes with prebuilt binaries (unusable in my case, since i use a different libc). this bloats up the tarball to twice the needed size or more, which affects download time and hd usage. the argument that 18 MB is nothing compared to 7G of blockdata, is not valid for people who just fetch all tarballs in one go (so they have them already in case they need it), but in the end do not use the bitcoin client.

so please in the future release a separate source code tarball and make it available from the default download page. thanks.

please also consider using the .xz compressor since it's about 40-60% better in compression and only slightly slower in decompression speed than .gz (but 3-4x as fast as bz2) and available on any linux distribution that came out in the last 5 years. even busybox supports it by default.

github supports downloading tarballs; see https://help.github.com/articles/downloading-files-from-the-command-line

Closing this. If you like, submit a pull request to one of our READMEs describing how to get a tarball.

And talk to github about using the .xz compressor.

github supports only tarballs that are generated on the fly, so their checksum will change once they go out of the cache. also, it does not support http so it is not possible to fetch the downloads with busybox wget (as is done in my distro). so that doesn't help at all.

edit: so please reopen this issue.

That does not seem to be a problem. The FreeBSD ports take tarballs from github for many ports, and they take and verify checksums as part of the build process. On 07/04/2013 2:55 AM, "rofl0r" notifications@github.com wrote:

github supports only tarballs that are generated on the fly, so their checksum will change on they go out of the cache. also, it does not support http so it is not possible to fetch the downloads with busybox wget (as is done in my distro). so that doesn't help at all.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/2473#issuecomment-15999593 .

even if that's true, that still leaves us with the problem that github is <b>HTTPS</b> only so the download url stays inaccessible for busybox wget.