basically, we have a current symlink which points to the most recent release, which is nice. The only problem this leaves is that there is no way to automagically locate files such at: http://gentoo.blueyonder.co.uk/releases/x86/2005.0/stages/x86/stage3-x86-2005.0.tar.bz2 What I would like to do is do something like: wget http://gentoo.blueyonder.co.uk/releases/$MYARCH/current/.is_release or wget http://gentoo.blueyonder.co.uk/releases/$MYARCH/.latest this file would contain either the release it relates to "2005.0" or the most recent release "2005.0". This would allow people to work out what files it is they need to grab to get the latest releases automagically. The main purpose this will give me is the ability to build recent stable/unstable environment images for not only testing, but as a base for disk images without intervention. This is important because the kind of people who will be doing this are really not linux-users :) Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
hey guys, johnm brought this up to me today in #-dev, let me hear your thoughts.
I think the current symlink provides most of this and, with some careful use of globbing, I would think you could get just about anything you wanted. If we want more than this, I don't believe providing another hierarchy of directories and symlinks is the best way to do it. Instead, I'd like to see someone write a script that generates a single text file that contains all the goodness that you need to do whatever it is you want. Something like: http://$distfile_mirror/releases/latest_release_info.txt (or maybe even an XML file) Maintaining a directory structure is fragile and prone to error. Any time we have to change it, it will be a major pain in the arse. Providing a single text file, otoh, is much easier, more flexible and more robust. My $.02.
This isn't a very valuable use of time on either front. Going with the original request, how do you decide which stage tarball to point the "current" pointer to, and as for a big text file, the only thing that will change over time are the release dates (2005.0, 2005.1), for many releases everything else about the url (including the filename) have been the same. I guess my point is that "current" doesn't scale for the dozens of choices that there are in Gentoo, and keeping a list is rather silly given the changes between each release are too minute to make a list worth looking at.
This has been in for months. Closing.
