Use official HTTP mirrors instead of FTP for 1-stable

[januszm]

Related PR: #384

Change FreeTDS source server from FTP to HTTP

[januszm]

It'd be great if one of the maintainers could have a look at failing specs. Looks like the test MSSQL server is not available?

[wpolicarpo]

@metaskills can you have a look here? I'm not sure if you want maintain 1.3.x given you decided to remove freetds installation from the gem itself (which I agree).

[aharpervc]

The http archive goes down all the time as well, unfortunately (doesn't mean we shouldn't merge this, just fyi)

[januszm]

Can't we upload source files to a more reliable cloud storage or CDN? (e.g. Amazon S3, CloudFront) ?

[wpolicarpo]

We can, but there are many problems with this approach:

1. Security: How to guarantee the integrity of downloaded file if we host it somewhere?
2. Cost: After all, someone would need to pay for it.
3. Maintainers would have to monitor/maintain another source of artifacts

I personally don't see any issues in merging this, but I don't think it will solve the main issue, which is managing external dependencies and probably that's why they changed it in 2.x.

In my opinion, installing freetds should be a step of your deploy. It's more secure and reliable if we do that by ourselves than delegating this to a gem installation.

[januszm]

@wpolicarpo

In my opinion, installing freetds should be a step of your deploy. It's more secure and reliable if we do that by ourselves than delegating this to a gem installation.

I can not agree more, but it's not always easily available on certain Linux distributions, and this mechanism of downloading and installing freetds is just a nice "emergency" mechanism.

This still does not seem like a fully reliable solution, but, you know what they say: "something is better than nothing".