On Fri, 28 Jan 2011 08:32:10 +0100 Pierre Schmitz pierre@archlinux.de wrote:

Hi engineers,

while working on my archportal project I wondered if it wouldn't be nice to have some meta information about our install images. The purpose of this would be automaticall generating the download page, README files, atom feeds etc.. What do you think about this idea in general?

1. Which information could we provide?

• release date/time
• release name
• kernel version
• changelog
• maybe some readme/instructions
• for each iso image:
  • file name
  • short description (e.g. netinstall iso image)
  • description
  • architectures (e.g. arch=(i686 x86_64)
  • size
  • checksums (md5, sha1)
  • signature (when package signing available)

2. Which format to use?

The easiest was is probably to create something similar to the db files for packages. That means several text files and directories within a tar file. For example some file with common information about this release in the root dir and specific information for each iso within subdir named like the iso file names.

I don't see the point of tarring. a few textfiles should be enough. and why not in the iso dir itself?

3. How to create it?

We'll need a simple way to create these db files automatically with every release. All information except descriptions can be filled in automatically.

So what do you guys think about this?

Good idea, checksums and torrents are already automatically generated (but whitelisting them is manual). readme is manually maintained but automatically copied. kernel version, filenames and sizes i can do easily. arch, date and "description" are encoded within filename. automatic Changelog is WIP, but for official releases manual editing (paraphrasing) needs to be applied to the Changelog anyway. package versions would be nice as well.

It would be nice if we could generate pages like https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:2010.05 (it doesn't need to be on the wiki)

what exactly is your archportal project?

Dieter