Add pure-text manifest file under dl.elv.sh

[notramo]

The current version can be downloaded at https://dl.elv.sh/{os}-{arch}/elvish-{version}.tar.gz
This URL isn't easy to remember if someone want to download it from a fully CLI environment without browser.
Something similar to this would be better:
https://elv.sh/get/linux-64
https://elv.sh/get/windows-32
https://elv.sh/get/linux-arm
These should automatically redirect to the download link of the latest release.

[xiaq]

One thing I didn't document is that uncompressed versions of the binaries are also available, just remove the .tar.gz at the end. For instance, the linux-amd64 binary for HEAD is
https://dl.elv.sh/linux-amd64/elvish-HEAD.

Using that as a baseline, the URLs you proposed don't have the following:

• The architecture names are abbreviated: for instance, amd64 is abbreviated to 64.

  Although it makes sense for now, will amd64 be "the" 64-bit architecture in the future?

• They don't have the version. That looks like an oversight to me. Should the URLs fetch the latest release or HEAD? It's better to make it explicit.

• As you said, the URLs should redirect to the "full" URLs. However, note that curl does not follow HTTP redirects by default, and this will make for a poorer user experience.

The current URLs also have the advantage that the last component makes sense as filenames. For instance, if you download https://dl.elv.sh/linux-amd64/elvish-HEAD to a linux-amd64 machine, the filename elvish-HEAD makes sense, because you don't need to be reminded that this is a linux machine running amd64.

tl;dr: I think the current URLs are only slightly longer and better than the URLs you proposed.

Happy to hear your opinions.

[notramo]

@xiaq You are right.
One thing that might help us when downloading in command line environment would be a text file at e.g. https://elv.sh/get/list that contains urls for architectures

HEAD
Linux x86_64 https://dl.elv.sh/linux-amd64/elvish-HEAD
Linux x86 https://dl.elv.sh/linux-386/elvish-HEAD
...

Latest stable release
Linux x86_64 https://dl.elv.sh/linux-amd64/elvish-v0.12.tar.gz
Linux ARMv8 https://dl.elv.sh/linux-arm64/elvish-v0.12.tar.gz
...

[xiaq]

I've rebranded this issue as "Add pure-text manifest file under dl.elv.sh".

[xiaq]

I just realized that you are really asking for an ls-lR file in good old FTP fashion. I did some research on whether modern http servers support generating ls-lR files automatically, and it seems that neither nginx nor Caddy has support for that niche(?) feature.

[xiaq]

Actually, since the upload server of dl.elv.sh is written by me (https://github.com/elves/up), I filed elves/up#1 to track this.

[xiaq]

Now that elves/up#1 has been fixed, there should be a https://dl.elv.sh/index.txt after next push.

[xiaq]

https://dl.elv.sh/INDEX now contains a list of all files available for download.