Releases: Provide parsable catalog files of releases

[rvagg]

Continuing nodejs/node#40 here. The summary is that to help version managers do their job with io.js we need to provide parsable catalog files detailing what releases are available (and perhaps other metadata).

Suggestion for now is to provide both a simple .txt file list in the same directory as release tarballs as well as a .json file that is extensible so we can put in additional metadata like shasums. See the comments in nodejs/node#40 for some great ideas.

The build team need to come up with a proposal for how it'll work before passing it back to the TC for acceptance. Be sure to include other interested parties in the discussion.

/ @smikes @ljharb @kenperkins @alexgorbatchev @keithamus @naholyr @mostman79 @gkatsev @Fishrock123 @arb

[ljharb]

To sum up from the other issue, something easily parseable in a shell, with version number, shasum, and binary URL, would be wonderfully helpful.

[ghostbar]

Something like http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/testing/Release ?

I think we could change the hashes with the list of packages to something like a hash with the list of releases tarballs ??

It comes to my mind something like:

hash sizeInBytes version relative/path/to/the/index/file.tar.gz
hash sizeInBytes version relative/path/to/the/index/file.xz

This allows us to give out several extensions of the same file and it's very easily parseable by a simple sed + awk script and from that create a JSON file.

[rvagg]

I've created an initial format for a catalogue, currently on nightlies but will also be on dist: index.json and index.tab

I'd really like feedback from version-manager authors on this, discussion happening in nodejs/node#301 (comment) for now

/cc @aaronpowell

[rvagg]

derp, fixed

[ljharb]

Referencing nvm-sh/nvm#616

[kenperkins]

@rvagg it seems this can be closed now?