Occasional build failure due to site issues

[ronaldtse]

The build failure is due to this:

We just recently noticed a problem with the GNDB "country files dataset”, where the version number flip-flops between “20210614” and “20210621”.

e.g. in my command shell, consecutive fetches result in this:

$ curl -ksSL https://geonames.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.html | sed -n 's/.*geonames_\([0-9]*\)\.zip.*/\1/p'
20210614
$ curl -ksSL https://geonames.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.html | sed -n 's/.*geonames_\([0-9]*\)\.zip.*/\1/p'
20210614
$ curl -ksSL https://geonames.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.html | sed -n 's/.*geonames_\([0-9]*\)\.zip.*/\1/p'
20210621
$ curl -ksSL https://geonames.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.html | sed -n 's/.*geonames_\([0-9]*\)\.zip.*/\1/p'
20210614
$ curl -ksSL https://geonames.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.html | sed -n 's/.*geonames_\([0-9]*\)\.zip.*/\1/p'
20210621

Note that this behavior is irregular, there’s no particular pattern to it.

I can only speculate the reason, perhaps one of the servers were not updated to 20210621, or that one of the servers were prematurely updated to 20210621…

This swapping has the effect of making this file effectively unavailable because the servers don’t seem to have both versions at the same time (the new server doesn’t have the old file, the old server doesn’t have the new file).

---

I have reported this to the site owner.

Originally posted by @ronaldtse in #8 (comment)

[ronaldtse]

This is still happening as of now, see #11.