With prototype ports of Docker to aarch64, Power LE, and s390 it has become apparent that we need to search and pull images from a repository based (in part) on the architectural platform they are built for.

Today repository search accepts a string which is then used to search the description field for each image. The list of images that hit are returned in a dictionary {'name': name 'description':description}.

The description field can be augmented by a single tag; the custom is to use a tag to indicate a release or build, just as you would use a tag in a source code control system.

Adding an optional platform field to the search term would allow a more precise image search when the native platform is important. There would bee no need to overload the description or tag data for an image. There is no need to alter the return value of repository search.