`brew audit` complains about github /tarball/ vs /archive/ URLs for several formulae

[apjanke]

Hello! I've been using homebrew for a while now, great stuff. Ran in to a small issue this week when playing around with it to better learn how it works.

When doing a brew audit for all formulae, it reports errors for many formulae that are downloading from "https://github.com/.../tarball/..." URLs instead of the /archive/ URL scheme, saying "Use /archive/ URLs for GitHub tarballs". I'm on homebrew version 0.9.4, with brew update done today bringing me to version 3f8ee127. As of today, 110 formulae are getting this complaint.

[@ in ~]
$ brew audit
ape:
 * Use /archive/ URLs for GitHub tarballs (url is https://github.com/APE-Project/APE_Server/tarball/v1.1.0).

appledoc:
 * Use /archive/ URLs for GitHub tarballs (url is https://github.com/tomaz/appledoc/tarball/v2.1).
[...snip...]

yle-dl:
 * `depends_on` can take requirement classes directly

Error: 117 problems in 116 formulae

I've attached my brew audit output as a gist: https://gist.github.com/apjanke/5265277

Seems like audit would be more useful if it had a clean baseline. There are a couple other more important sounding complaints (e.g. about not depending on postgresql) nestled in there that might be getting lost. Is this something that's worth cleaning up? And since it's a simple issue that affects many formulae, is it something a single dev could do in one branch/commit. Or would that be seen as intrusive by the maintainers of the individual formulae, and fixes should be done separately to each formula through its maintainer?

I'd be willing to take a stab at this if it would be appropriate.

Affected formulae: ape appledoc arping authexec autoenv blueutil brew-gem brew-pip bup casperjs chipmunk clay cocot colloquypush contacts couchdb-lucene cpansearch cppcheck css-crush daemonize darner direnv disco discount dotwrp doubledown drip ent exodriver f3 fasd field3d freerdp fuse4x fuse4x-kext gibo gist git-cola git-encrypt git-extras git-ftp git-gerrit git-ssh git-tracker git-url-sub grok gti hiredis htop-osx hub imapfilter ios-sim jbig2enc jsawk jsdoc3 jsmin kes lastfmfpclient lbdb libgit2 liblastfm libmonome logentries macvim mdbtools mdxmini metalua minc minisat narwhal ninja opencolorio openmeeg osm-pbf pbrt pdal peg-markdown pianobar pit plenv plt-racket plustache pmdmini pngpaste pngquant points2grid poster rbenv rbenv-bundler rbenv-default-gems rbenv-gemset rbenv-vars redo redsocks repl resty roundup ruby-build runcocoa serialosc shell.fm sickbeard sshfs the_silver_searcher tup vf voms vowpal-wabbit webkit2png xbee-comm

Fixing this will require updating both the URL and the sha1 hash value in each of the affected installs. The tarballs that are downloaded from the /archive/ and /tarball/ URLs differ at least because they name the top-level directory differently, even if they're grabbing the same repo contents. (Beneath that dir, files look identical, for the ones I checked.)

• tarball = user-repo-commit (e.g. "tomaz-appledoc-6f109ed")
• archive = repo-tag (e.g. "appledoc-2.1")

[MikeMcQuaid]

You can run brew audit on individual formulae. It doesn't have a clean baseline just because basically we know there are issues that need fixed but haven't got round to fixing it properly yet.

[MikeMcQuaid]

But yeh, if you can clean any of these up please do and fire up a pull request, thanks.

[apjanke]

What's the standard for testing formulae that have been altered? I've set up a "clean" OS X 10.8.3 build in a VM with just XCode and a fresh homebrew install as a baseline testing environment. Can I update the URLs for multiple formulae and test them all in one big brew install run, or do I need to test each formula separately from a clean system?

[jacknagel]

As long as you're only changing to the new URL (and not updating the version), you don't need to test the install

[apjanke]

Okay, I'm going to take give this a try then.

[jacknagel]

To summarize:

• the archive URL check was recently added because github has deprecated the old-style tarball URLs; this is why so many formulae have this issue
• the warning that postgis depends on postgresql directly should be ignored, as it does actually require a homebrew-built postgres in order to install itself correctly
• the warnings about build options are because the new-style build options DSL doesn't support valued options yet

Closing because we don't need an issue open for this, but definitely welcome audit cleanups.

[apjanke]

Okay, so if I update the old-style tarball URLs for some formulae to clean up the audit warnings, what issue should I link the pull request against? Make a separate issue when a batch is ready for pulling?

[jacknagel]

Pull requests are issues, just submit a pull request.

[apjanke]

Okay, made a pull request covering formulae A-K: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/pull/18813

[Smolations]

I think this should be re-opened or a new issue reported (which I'd be happy to do). The GitHub API will be on v3 by default starting April 2014. Brew should accept both formats until the old /archive/ format is officially deprecated, don't you think?

[jacknagel]

@Smolations as I also noted in your pull request, the URLs in question are unrelated to the API.