Get Iplayer for Windows

[Jon Davies]

On 14 August 2011 18:03, David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-08-14 at 17:41 +0100, Jon Davies wrote:
>> (I don't see why perl isn't just another
>> component, I can't see a good reason for it being included in the
>> installer, given that pretty much nothing else is.)
>
> I looked at that. The subset of Strawberry Perl used for get_iplayer is
> about a tenth the size of the full (even the minimal) installation.
> That's the reason I didn't switch over to doing it that way.

Ah, there are two aspects to this:
1. why not distribute the whole of strawberry perl?  for which the
answer is that a minimal subset is smaller and can be built such that
it includes non-standard packages, which is useful, and to support
dinkypumpkin's new tagging stuff necessary. (though by the time you
add the extra packages from CPAN to support tagging and some other
features that have recently crept into versions of get_iplayer, it's
not hugely smaller.)
2. why not make the packaged version of perl a downloadable component?
 if we're making the other dependencies updatable components, then it
would make sense to make the perl distribution an updatable component
as well, which would allow us to update perl without building an
entire installer.  By extension, the windows scripts should be a
downloadable component too, so that they too can be updated in the
same way.  But this doesn't have to be done in one go.

>> I have an objection in principle to install/update functionality that
>> depends on the server behaving in a particular way because it ties you
>> to servers that can be specifically configured, which rules out many
>> hosting services - so using server-side redirects somewhat irks me.
>
> I'm not sure that's a consideration. We're pointing it at our *own*
> service which *is* under our control.

It's not a strongly held objection ;-)  It's more that I like to
decouple things as much as possible, and making the installer/updater
dependent on server-side functionality essentially carves the
installer into two separate tightly-coupled subsystems, which is more
complicated than one subsystem and a configuration file.  Hence some
of the but-if-I-do-this-we-might-break-the-existing-installer
comments.

> I can even put the get_iplayer.cgi
> script from http://www.infradead.org/cgi-bin/get_iplayer.cgi into the
> git repository.

since it's now an integral part of the installer/updater, this would make sense.

Thanks for hosting this ;-)

Cheers
Jon