I just had an idea tonight for a way to automatically download and build a source release tar ball from an open source project. I call it Sourcecasting. I’m sure this idea can’t be novel because it merely extends the ideas of podcasting and photocasting, but I was thinking that it might be convenient for project, distro and rpm maintainers particularly if open source projects had a unified way of releasing their latest versions. So, why not create an RSS feed with links to the last 10 or so source tar ball releases e.g. a FOSS project Sourcecast so to speak.

Most FOSS projects have an ftp site and some methodical way of naming files, and this has been working pretty well since the grand experiment had begun. There are some problems with this because it does require quite a bit of infoware (custom perl/python, etc) to handle these in any kind automated way. A Sourcecast would really be a convenient method for everyone compiling or releasing source code tar balls in whatever capacity.

There are several advantages to Sourcecasting over just putting a download link to Sourceforge and using a weblog to promote your project. First, this method would systematically let everyone know where the last 10 or so release can be downloaded. Next, a Sourcecast RSS feed could even be used to load balance or to perform a phased release using GeoIPFree (e.g. incrementally roll out your release on a per country basis). You could even go in finer granularity if you had state and ZIP Code IP address databases (which cost $$$$). Another interesting spin on load balancing this way is that you could even write some javascript to (initially, not for every load) calculate the fastest download link for your site, and then send the latencies back to the server via SOAP or XMLHTTPRequest, the server could then create a custom RSS feed specifically for your location. This could then be updated on an as needed basis. For huge source code releases, you could even use a torrent to mitigate bandwidth charges. Another large advantage to this method would be that all open source projects now have a machine parsable release strategy, and this could really improve the productivity of distro and package maintainers (Red Hat are you listening?). Not only that, but it’d be useful to add Sourcecasts to an RSS Reader just to see when your favorite project has released new version.

I know it’s kind of silly to expect everyone to start doing this, but there are some backdoors. Probably the easiest way to do this is for free would be for the Apache Foundataion add an automatic RSS feed to mod_autoindex. This way, Sourcecasting is essentially painless and would come for free if you ran Apache’s httpd. I think this could really be a huge boon to productivity for FOSS, if implemented correctly. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if some projects are already doing this in one form or another, but I haven’t seen any mention of it on Google. So, at the risk of sounding like a sanctimonius dolt, I present this idea as my own.