Package: ftp.debian.org Severity: wishlist X-Debbugs-CC: debian-devel@lists.debian.org Various places in Debian infrastructure (QA especially) hard-code aspects of the Debian archive (suite, code, component, arch names etc). This is a problem because after new suites or architectures are added, we have lots of places that need to be updated. Most of them can be fixed (help needed), however Debian does not provide information about which repositories are available where, which suites are provided by them, nor any information about the relative order of those suites, nor any information about which suites are archived. The Ubuntu solution for this is a separate host containing meta-data about which releases they have and info about which are supported: http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/meta-release I propose the following implementation: Detached OpenPGP signatures so that the information is easily and safely verifiable; safe verification of inline signatures have been shown to be harder to implement in the past. Automatically generated based on the dak database/configuration so that it never gets out of date. Generated on a per-repository basis so that consumers get the data they are interested in. Here I mean one for ftp.d.o/debian and one for each of the archive.d.o/* repositories. Be machine-readable by a variety of languages (including shell and more capable languages), deb822 format seems best here. Be named Suites (in the dists dir) & Repositories (on ftp-master). The data needed for the Suites file is basically just a list of suite names but maybe we need some other information like the relationships between them? Metadata of the suites themselves should be in the Release files as usual. The data needed for the Repositories file is basically just a list of repositories canonical URLs and if the repository is active or not. Perhaps it would be useful to have names fields or other data too? Be documented in the repository format docs and supported by the various tools for setting up and managing repositories. https://wiki.debian.org/RepositoryFormat We also need to tie in the cdimage.d.o site somehow as there is usually some delay between main archive releases and image releases. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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