I hadn't seen anything posted to misc@ or tech@ about this yet, but
wanted to thank the person responsible for the relatively recent
addition (looks like late Oct or early Nov 2015) of the BUILDINFO
file included with the kernel/base snapshots. I only noticed it last
week and it was a rather nice surprise.
There's a tool I've cleverly dubbed 'trackcur' created and massaged
over the years to help automate the process of following -current
using the install kernel and binary packages. The original intent was
to avoid some of the potential pitfalls I encountered while following
the process manually (like updating to a flag-day snapshot which
doesn't yet have package snapshots built or updating packages from a
mirror still syncing from the master site), and it's grown to include
other useful things to help stay up-to-date like syncing a repo via
cvsync and checking out a local copy of src+ports from it.
The biggest challenge was trying to devise a way to reliably and
consistently track file timestamps on an arbitrary mirror via
arbitrary transport without several hacky transport-specific methods
-- e.g., HTML scraping and/or checking Last-Modified for HTTP
transport.
I'm not privy to how the snapshot package builds make it up to the
master site, but would it be possible to generate a similar file that
would live in the root of a given arch's package snaps? It would
satisfy my selfish needs, but I think others may also see the value
in a similar file for package builds. This would provide definitive
information on the build, independent of file timestamps that may be
lost or unavailable depending on the method of transfer.
Is the generation of this file something that can be done relatively
easy?
Thanks,
--avj
