Draft manifest format specification.

[C. Scott Ananian]

I have added a draft manifest specification to the wiki at:
   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Manifest_Specification
There is not yet consensus on this specification; it shouldn't be
viewed as final by any means.

You can look at the history of the specification on the wiki: in the
history I've added Noah and Michael's original specification, and my
original counter-proposal.  The current 'most recent' version of the
page includes changes I made to address Noah's concerns (symbolic
user/group information and detached signatures) and Ivan's (easier
resource-bounded parsing).

The final manifest specification will be used in activity and library bundles:
  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_bundles
  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Creating_a_content_bundle
to authenticate contents, allow incremental downloading of a zipped
bundle, and to support hard-linking of shared files.  It will also be
used for base system upgrades, for roughly the same purposes.

At the moment, the specification does not exactly match any other
manifest specification (git, updatinator, incremental rsync, etc)
which is rather unfortunate.

Discussion is desired.
 --scott

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )