Stalish downloads still on Tigris

It turns out that there are still quite a few folks downloading the rather stale-ish binary packages still stored on Tigris (Subversion installers and language bindings). We see around 40,000 downloads of these files per week, even though the newest is version 1.6.6. This is probably mostly confusion. I wonder if we shouldn't do something to un-confuse all these people?

What I'd propose would be:
1. move these packages to some other directory, that a bit more clearly shows their status (such as the existing "Windows Archive" one)
2. Put something (banner note, or URL-reference, something like that) into the folder to direct lost wanderers to packages.html or similar.

Sound reasonable? Additional thoughts? I'm happy to do the work.

Background:

There are, of course, other places with newer packages available. I don't really know why people keep downloading the new ones (and non-trivial numbers are still downloading Really Old Ones, even back into "releases" 0.X.X). A few of these downloads are probably people who know what they're doing -- testing against old versions, for example, to isolate when a problem first arose. But 40K/week? I don't think so!

Mark Phippard and DJ Heap both suspect these are, fundamentally, some sort of confusion: people think Tigris is "the official source," or something like that. I had thought there might be some deeper reason, such as preferring the packaging format, but they talked me out of that.

-==-
Jack Repenning
jackrepenning_at_tigris.org
Domain Administrator
http://www.tigris.org
Received on 2010-06-25 00:30:22 CEST