I was wondering if it would be possible for Releng to create persistent stage names in each /gentoo/releases/<arch>/current dir, so that stage3-i686-20090422.tar.bz2 becomes stage3-i686-latest.tar.bz2 for instance, if that is the latest stage 3. You are doing something similar in the /gentoo/releases/snapshots/current dir with the portage snapshots. With this, the Linux Terminal Server Project installer (http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=177580) can easily retrieve stage3 snapshots from Gentoo instead of Funtoo, and more architectures will be available. Reproducible: Always
Robbat2, what do you think?
I answered this via email already. I'll paste it here. > I'm against the symlinks, simple because then users end up with a > -latest tarball that has no metadata included in it. I consider being > able to identify that important for bug reporting. > > We do have an identifying string (I'll call it the identifier here) > already when we're making the stages and media, so if we're going to add > the symlink, I'd like the identifier added in two places: > 1. inside the tarball: /etc/gentoo-install-media (better filenames welcomed) > 2. In the tar volume label (tar --label "XYZ" cvf ...) > > The volume label lets us easily check tarballs without extracting them. If we get the identifiers, and users know that they _MUST_ include it when reporting a bug, then we can do the symlinks.
Perhaps a text file in the /releases/<arch>/autobuilds/ dir containing the latest release filename will do. Determining the latest release will only require a quick wget on the text file.
nightmorph: you might find the below useful too. Yes, we can have text files easily for you (better than symlinks too). I'll have: latest-stages.txt latest-isos.txt As applicable for each architecture. There may be multiple lines in each, example: /releases/x86/autobuilds/latest-stages.txt: 20090804/hardened/stage3-i686-hardened-20090804.tar.bz2 20090804/stage3-i686-20090804.tar.bz2 alpha, sparc, ia64 are the only architectures that release only a single stage each run. All the other architectures produce a few different ones.
I saw the latest-stage3.txt's in the autobuild dirs, thanks. Perhaps someone could make a news item out of this, this is a nice feature.
