GNU ARM Eclipse plug-ins update sites migrated to Bintray

Posted on May 2, 2017 by Liviu Ionescu.

After serving almost 6 million downloaded files, the Eclipse update sites were migrated from the venerable SourceForge to the new Bintray site.

Rationale

After several security incidents, by the end of 2016, SourceForge decided to change the security certificates and to mandate the use of HTTPS. This resulted in a large number of complains from users behind firewalls, who were no longer able to access the Eclipse update sites, and had to manually download archives and install locally. Although not at all the fault of GNU ARM Eclipse (the root of the problem seems to be in the Oracle Java libraries), the SourceForge desire to use stronger encryption was in the end perceived as a bad user experience by GNU ARM Eclipse users, a situation that we cannot accept.

GitHub

The main development site used by the project is and will remain GitHub, but since GitHub Releases currently do not support subfolders, publishing the Eclipse update sites on GitHub Releases is not an option. Publishing on GitHub Pages or even directly as a Git project might have been technically possible, but neither are intended for high volume downloads and do not provide any analytics.

Bintray servers

Bintray is a modern solution for software distribution, with many new features compared to the traditional SourceForge rsync approach.

The Bintray page to manage the downloads is https://bintray.com/gnu-mcu-eclipse, with several separate repositories, each with its own statistics.

The new internal URL addresses used for downloads are:

• https://dl.bintray.com/gnu-mcu-eclipse/updates
• https://dl.bintray.com/gnu-mcu-eclipse/updates-test

SourceForge redirects

For compatibility reasons, the old URLs will continue to be active and maintained, being redirected to the same Bintray locations:

• http://gnuarmeclipse.sourceforge.net/updates
• http://gnuarmeclipse.sourceforge.net/updates-test

Expected issues

This change is expected to have no negative consequences on existing Eclipse installations. Enterprise networks with absurd security limitations which prevented direct access to the update site and required manual downloads of the release archives may (or may not…) have a better chance for normal Eclipse install/update.

The change in the public URL should be seamless, with all future plug-ins versions to automatically point to the new URLs.

Update

Starting with Eclipse plug-ins v4.x, the Eclipse update sites URLs were migrated to Netlify.

Many thanks to all those who use this project!