Hi, I'm trying to use GSRC to compile GNU software on a locked-down corporate box that only has access to the internet through a corporate HTTP/HTTPS proxy; all other outward connections are blocked. I think this is probably a common use case for GSRC.
I ran into a problem with initially downloading GSRC; I had to change the checkout command mentioned on https://www.gnu.org/software/gsrc/ to: bzr checkout http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/gsrc/trunk/ gsrc to get an initial checkout of GSRC. It would be nice if this command was already using http://, or at least the alternative command was mentioned on that page. Note that http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/gsrc/trunk/ does not work. Right now I have another problem: While most source tarballs seem to be downloaded over HTTP, libffi (a dependency of GNU Guile) is downloaded with FTP. So it is blocked by the corporate firewall. It would be nice in gsrc had an HTTP tarball url that it could fall back to. I see that libffi releases are also available on Github at https://github.com/libffi/libffi/releases but I don't know if downloading them from Github is too unsavory. I am sure there are other packages that use FTP as well. It would be nice if GSRC explicitly supported falling back to HTTP for such packages. I am also unsure about the best way to provide an alternative source tarball for a package, to work around these issues for me specifically. Thank you for the hard work! GSRC is otherwise amazing!
