[xiphos-devel] 4.2.0 tagged and pushed

[Caleb Maclennan]

>> OK, to follow up to myself, I got the auto-build results email, which reports 6 successful builds and 1 failed deployment.  From that email, I used the link to see the results, and have a packages.zip (174M) containing 2 Windows *.exe, 1 Fedora 31 rpm, a generic tarball (funny name, has double '.'), and a deb, which I presume is generic to Debian and Ubuntu both (editor-less?).

Those artifacts could be manually posted to the Github release since
the upload failed. I suggest that over deleting the tag, then tagging
a patch release when the auto system is expected to work to make sure
it does.

> No Arch build?

The build system tests a source build on arch. Technically you _could_
build a package too, but the Arch ecosystem has a platform for doing
that already, and I'm one of the maintainers of the Xiphos recipe.
Because there are also other dependencies (gtkhtml4, gnome-doc-utils,
biblesync) that need to be distributed too it is better to let the
distro packaging channels take care of this.

>     * The deb file is specifically generated as part of the Ubuntu workflow, but it's going to require a bit of manual install of deps, because that's not packaged into the file. Also no - it's not editor-less, and it would require packaging up the GtkHTML we're building from source inside of the
>     * RPM is specific to the version of Fedora it was built on, as well.
>     * Conclusion: we can probably drop both of these as release artifacts.

Yes to all this. All these distros have proper packaging channels, and
upstreams that provide half baked packages that mostly integrate with
the system but aren't quite a match for dependency versions etc. are
the pits. Better to have people do source builds in most cases — or
just fix the official distro packaging channels. Ubuntu, Debian, and
Fedora all have those things.

> Let distros do their own packaging that way it's properly integrated. If we want to offer our own package repositories, we should do so by offering proper repos that can be added to apt/yum/zypper/pacman etc rather than one-off download files.

Correct. For Ubuntu we could offer a PPA with all the dependencies
matching a distro release. Same for most distros.

> * I'm not sure Arch builds are a thing? I'm really hazy on how Arch works. It seems like the modern day Gentoo, but with a better wiki.

For Arch Linux I already do host a repository with prebuilt packages
based on the AUR formula. People can build themselves from the formula
or grab the package with pacman at any time. I'd be happy to push
those builds to a Xiphos official location, but actually I'm working
towards getting it included in the official distro repository by
default so that may not be necessary.