8 Standalone Options

Standalone options don’t require a release tarball. They can be used to delete existing tarballs or symlinks from the distribution server or to create symlinks to already released tarballs¹.

To delete an already existing tarball, use the --delete option:

grayupload --to ftp.gnu.org:foo --delete foo-1.0.tar.gz

Notice, that in this case foo-1.0.tar.gz is not the name of a tarball to be uploaded. It is the name of a tarball that already exists on the distribution server, and that the user wants to remove.

Depending on the distribution server setup, the tarball can be removed or archived, i.e. moved away to some archive storage, from where it can be restored if the need be.

A similar option, --rmsymlink, deletes an existing symlink:

grayupload --to ftp.gnu.org:foo --rmsymlink foo-latest.tar.gz

Both --delete and --rmsymlink options take multiple arguments, and can thus be used to delete multiple files (or symlinks) in one go.

Third standalone option, --symlink, allows you to create symbolic links to already existing release tarballs. It takes any number of ‘tarball linkname’ pairs as its arguments. Here, tarball is the name of an existing tarball, and linkname is the name of a symlink to that tarball that you want to create.

Although not designed for such usage, standalone options can be mixed with the regular uploads. If you do wish to use the two at once, use the --upload option to introduce release tarball names, e.g.:

grayupload --to ftp.gnu.org:foo \
     --rmsymlink foo-latest.tar.gz foo-stable.tar.gz \
     --upload foo-1.0.tar.gz --latest

The above example will cause two directive files to be created and uploaded: one containing standalone directives, and another one for uploading foo-1.0.tar.gz.

Notice, that in this case the remote server gives no promise on the exact order in which the submitted directives will be applied.