Touhou Patch Center talk:Servers

Public Dropbox
It seems that the public folder is out of the question for new users. I thought I had created my account before they put out that feature, but it seems not, and the new "Share Link" feature doesn't work ("Can't reach a valid server at this moment"). I'll try to use a different cloud service.


 * Yes, apparently public folders are now only available for new Pro or Business accounts. This is of course unacceptable, especially at these prices.
 * This has to be a very recent development, and I can't track down any official announcement. I only know that it still was possible for Basic accounts when wobuffet3 set up his server on January 17, 2014.


 * The problem with most cloud services is that they mostly don't represent the original directory structure inside the URL, and instead use these hash values to index the files. This is exactly why "Share link" doesn't work - there is no standard way of locating the other files in the server.
 * The only other service I can think of that is guaranteed to work would be GitHub which is also what I am using for the base patches now.


 * In fact, this is a much nicer solution for custom patch servers anyway: With a revision control system at its core, the entire patch history is kept and publicly visible, and GitHub also adds issue trackers to discuss possible changes. However, it essentially is a system for managing open-source software projects, and thus adds a certain complexity to the whole process for non-programmers. On the other hand, programmers would feel right at home - and this is why I initially shied away from writing a tutorial for it, since they can probably figure it out on their own.


 * That said, I'll write up a tutorial for that later today. Maybe GitHub's shiny Windows GUI even makes things intuitive enough. If you find another service that supports storing files a similar URL structure to the one used by our server, let me know. --NamelessLegacy (talk) 16:06, 26 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Turns out there's actually a serious problem with using GitHub in practice.


 * The main purpose of the repository update script is to recalculate the checksums in the files.js files, which are used by the updater to determine which files to download. This step would have to be done every time before committing a new patch update to GitHub.


 * The problem here is that GitHub's raw file mode, which we would use to access the patches, seems to automatically force line endings to the Unix format (\n). If the files previously had Windows line endings ('\r\n'), the checksums in files.js no longer match up with the content returned by GitHub, and the download fails as a result.


 * I need to think a bit about how to best fix this issue. The easy solution would be to just have repo_update.py rewrite all the line endings itself. On the other hand proper support for the Git protocol in the thcrap updater would be the best solution in every respect (both technically and for the patch creators), but I can't tell whether it's possible to implement this on short notice... --NamelessLegacy (talk) 18:16, 29 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Finally, I got the server running with Git. To submit it, I have to include the RepoDir\repo.js file, right?--Ghildrean (talk) 09:22, 8 May 2014 (UTC)
 * A link to the GitHub page is fine. --NamelessLegacy (talk) 09:34, 8 May 2014 (UTC)