Unicode Sorting Weight Tables

[Erich E. Hoover]

On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 1:57 PM Alexandre Julliard <julliard at winehq.org> wrote:
>
> Fabian Maurer <dark.shadow4 at web.de> writes:
>
> > Hello Alexandre,
> >
> > thanks your your reply.
> >
> >> Sorry about the delay. I believe it would be OK to use that data as
> >> reference for our implementation. We'd most likely want to use them the
> >> same way we use the unicode.org data, so we'd need to find a reliable
> >> download source that can be used in the make_unicode script.
> >
> > Would the download from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?
> > id=10921 suffice?

I would highly recommend not using this one ^^, as the target will
change over time and can require specific user agent strings to work
if they decide to try to protect you from installing something that
won't work for your current OS.  It is useful to keep this link as a
comment for when you want to update, but I would not recommend baking
it into a script.

> > They seem to have a permanent GUID, like https://download.microsoft.com/
> > download/C/F/7/CF713A5E-9FBC-4FD6-9246-275F65C0E498/
> > Windows%2010%20Sorting%20Weight%20Table.txt
> > Though, like all links, they might not last forever.

This one will not change target over time ^^, though it can disappear*.

> Links tend to have a shorter than average lifetime on Microsoft's sites,
> but that would be good enough.
>...

Microsoft has been using these "permanent" GUID links for years and
hasn't touched them, but the download ID links have a tendency to
change target after a while.  For example, this page has ID-based
links for old versions of Silverlight:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/silverlight/dotnet-windows-silverlight/cc265156(v=vs.95)?redirectedfrom=MSDN

But be warned that if you try to use them then it will _always_ give
you the most recent version (and you have to have EXACTLY the right
user agent string).  So, if you provide an old Windows XP Firefox UA
string then you can get it to download Silverlight 5.1.30514.0:
https://download.microsoft.com/download/F/8/C/F8C0EACB-92D0-4722-9B18-965DD2A681E9/30514.00/Silverlight.exe

However, if you kept the GUID link back when it was findable then that
will continue to work.  For example, this is the (still working) link
that I have for Silverlight 1.0.30715.0 from 2008:
http://silverlight.dlservice.microsoft.com/download/8/9/f/89f01724-01a6-428e-bf14-e869395e188c/Silverlight.exe

Which, as of this moment, is not indexed by Google.  Though it will be
when this email shows up in our archive ;)

Best,
Erich

* This is _very_ rare, but it happens occasionally when security
vulnerabilities are issued.