chatterino2-git aur package: please consider toning down the version bump ci job a bit

[Ckath]

currently it seems the aur package gets version bumped on every single git commit this causes the package to be rebuild constantly for everyone that has the -git installed from the aur.

I did a quick check with some others in #archlinux and everyone agreed vcs packages are really only meant to be updated for packaging changes, not every commit or even really any version change in software for that matter.

my suggestions here would be to test the pkgbuild in ci, but only push to aur unless an error causing it to not build correctly is fixed. not sure how this would be achieved as I'm not that familiar with ci, possibly some special commit tag?

would also be interested what others think as I have gotten some odd stuff before on the chatterino2-git package, like it being flagged as 'out-of-date' when there wasnt any packaging issue.

[leon-richardt]

I think we should stick to the convention for *-git packages

[pajlada]

Is there proper documentation for how the *-git packages are supposed to behave?

If not, this could be a good wiki topic to add

[Ckath]

not specifically as far as I could find, its 'implied' by the pkgver() function always generating the latest version regardless of what the package states. its generally assumed a -git will just grab the latest sources
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/VCS_package_guidelines

[pajlada]

We could potentially tone it down to a cronjob instead for now, so push it once per day/once per week if new commits have happened.

The reason we started pushing changes through the CI pipeline was to ensure people actually got the new updates without having to use the --devel flag in their AUR wrappers (This was a user complaint).

This could be alleviated by having multiple AUR packages, as other packages normally do.
e.g. chatterino2, chatterino2-nightly-appimage etc

Would a chatterino2-nightly-appimage making updates through the CI fit within the AUR philosophy?

[pajlada]

That was where the confusion came from I believe, as users were not receiving 'updates' without us bumping the pkgver, rather they had to manually update the package or search for updates using the --devel flag.

The solution I had for a long time was manually bumping pkgver every now and then, until #2491 was implemented.

[Ckath]

it would probably be benifitial to make some non -git packages, when I first put the chatterino2-git package up there werent any fast release cycles yet or many resources. but now it makes more sense to do some regular packages.

if theres just chatterino2/chatterino2-nightly which builds from the sources in releases, or some appimage ones like chatterino2-appimage/chatterino2-appimage-nightly. that would probably be a better option for most users

if you want I could do the pkgbuilds for the former(not that famliar with appimages myself) or if not its just basically a copy of the current -git one minus pkgver(), with actual md5sums and with a source of https://github.com/Chatterino/chatterino2/archive/v$pkgver.tar.gz

[pajlada]

Fair enough - we serve a lot of new Linux users (and the package is co-maintained by someone who also isn't too familiar with AUR and its guidelines).

As action items:

1. Disable the pushing from the CI job (can be achieved by setting the GitHub Action aur-sync-action dry_run flag to true)
2. Create new binary AUR packages
   • chatterino2-appimage - Manually revised AUR package, pushed whenever a new stable version of Chatterino2 has been released.
   • chatterino2-nightly-appimage - Automatically pushed AUR package, built in CI pushing an updated version of an AppImage file.
3. Pin a comment at the top of the current chatterino2-git AUR package, possibly adding some 'echo' postinstall, explaining how VCS packages work

Do you see anything wrong with the above-mentioned action items @micwoj92 ?

Thanks for your understanding and patience as I try to learn.

[micwoj92]

Everything seems good, if you need help just @ me. Thanks for sorting it out.

[Ckath]

if you want I could do the pkgbuilds for the former(not that famliar with appimages myself) or if not its just basically a copy of the current -git one minus pkgver(), with actual md5sums and with a source of https://github.com/Chatterino/chatterino2/archive/v$pkgver.tar.gz

turns out the regular idea of packages where you build from a releases src tar gets complicated quite a bit when you throw in submodule build deps. for which the solutions seem to be 'package all the submodules as aur packages' - which isnt great for this, 'build from git anway' - which isnt super clean for 'release' packages, 'do some cryptic stuff to build from the src tarball while adding the submodules form git' - which just seems even worse.

but I think just adding the -appimage and -appimage-nightly packages, and leaving -git updates be unless broken should be all good

[Ckath]

would it be possible to put all the submodule libs in the release tar? this would ease the release packages as you can then just build from that directly without jumping through any hoops