Enabling 'skopeo inspect' to display the architectures supported by an image hosted on a remote registry

[Ricky-Tigg]

Hello. Currently, skopeo can inspect an image hosted on a remote registry's repository and reveal repository tags that are associated to it—necessary knowledge. Equally necessary is knowledge of the hardware architectures supported by the image. Couldn't the same be true for them?

Currently, importing a copy of the image hosted on the registry's repository onto the local host is required beforehand to determine its architectures.

Illustration with an image to which the tag "latest" is associated

chosen image: quay.io/podman/hello

note: image referred to as '<image>' in following command-lines

Existence of that tag
'podman search --list-tags --format={{.Tag}} <image>'

$ podman pull <image>
$ podman manifest inspect <image> | \
grep "\"architecture\"" | awk '$1=$1'| cut -d " " -f2- | sed -r "s/,$//g"
"amd64"
"arm64"
"ppc64le"
"s390x"

Only then do we know the architectural specifications that are valid for the desired image. And so, the image with the desired supported architecture can be inspected.

$ skopeo --override-arch arm64 inspect docker://<image> --format "{{.Architecture}}"
arm64

[Luap99]

you can use skopeo inspect --raw docker://quay.io/podman/hello | jq .manifests.[].platform to get the raw manifest and the query the platforms of each entry

[Ricky-Tigg]

That '--raw' option, i was aware of its existence and also knew its description in skopeo-inspect(1)():

Output raw manifest [...]

Then as it is, I could conclude its resulting output is meant to be identical to the one resulting from 'podman manifest inspect', but as displayed in raw format obviously. Therefore I did not feel the need to invoke it since did not need an output in the raw format.

For what matters, I did not expect from an answer here that it would be revealed an inconsistency in outputs resulting from 'skopeo inspect' when invoked with and without the '--raw' option, and consequently make it an opportunity for a correction. What could have been the motivation at the time for acting in this way?