Allowing users to submit committed Zipped VM's as pull requests about utm-templates

[3DCoded]

I'll look into it.

[jamesmortensen]

I had a few more thoughts this morning. When large files are committed to git, pulling, cloning, and pushing can take significantly longer, since each person cloning, pushing, or pulling will be doing so on the entire history of the project. As more ZIP files are added, this will grow in size.

I was thinking it might be possible to remove the commit from the history, once the file is made available in the GitHub Actions runner, and then do a git push from GitHub Actions with a GitHub App (bot). Then create a new commit with the filename in a README or something significantly smaller. Once the artifact is uploaded in the GitHub releases section, the ZIP won't need to be in the git history.

I can grab the hash of the previous commit using this: git log | head -n 1 | awk '{print $2}' and then subsequently remove it completely via options presented on Stack Overflow, such as:

git reset `git log | head -n 1 | awk '{print $2}'` --hard
git push origin -f

There might be some magic we'd need to do before deleting the commit, like creating a new commit with a link to the download, or something like that, just so the release tag has some commit to attach to.

[jamesmortensen]

Also, this may end up being a limitation. Release artifacts are limited to 2GB in size. I see many of your samples are significantly higher than 2 GB.

Therefore, having folks commit hyperlinks may be more scalable (and involve less work as well).

Moreover, even though Microsoft and Apple offer their VM's for free, there could be licensing issues with distributing Microsoft and perhaps Apple VM's as well. This might be why the UTM team only gives instructions for how to create them. For instance, users are directed to Microsoft's insider program for obtaining the disk image from the Microsoft site directly after creating an insider program account.

[3DCoded]

I started adding funcitonality in the app to warn of an unverified Community Uploaded VM. https://github.com/smattar2020/utm-templates/actions/runs/2245267663. I am also thinking of having a utility in the app to generate a VM automatically.

[3DCoded]

I don't know much about GitHub actions (the farthest I have gotten is to build a DMG on commit) so as of now I am just trying to find good docs for the GitHub actions. If you want to make it and submit it as a pull request, that would be welcome too. Thank you.

[3DCoded]

I added more warnings about community uploaded VMs. I am thinking that there would be JSON that the app pulls from online for the VMs. Here is the new version with search functionality: https://github.com/smattar2020/utm-templates/actions/runs/2246893041