Provide an unstable version

[StanleySweet]

It has been quite a while since the last 0 A.D. release (Still working on it, sorry about that) and I was wondering if it was possible for you guys to also provide a bleeding edge flatpack for people that would want to try the dev version?

[corecontingency]

Flathub supports a beta branch for unstable releases, but a -git / nightly version isn't supported yet.

As explained here:

Exactly if and how this is used is up to each individual application maintainer, but the goal of this is to have a way for developers to get early releases of new stable versions into the hand of regular users.

This isn’t meant to be used for nightly builds, but for releases that has some level of testing and are expected to mostly work and be usable to non-developer end-users.

However, if you want to have a -git flatpak, you can always just publish it to a flatpak repo on 0ad's website and setup some CI to automatically rebuild on every commit. GNOME already does this.

Users could add your proposed nightly flatpak repo with a command like this:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists 0ad-nightly https://nightly.play0ad.com/0ad-nightly.flatpakrepo

And then install the nightly version of 0ad like this:

flatpak install 0ad-nightly com.play0ad.zeroad.Devel

[barthalion]

I'd say that the bottom line here is that it's ultimately up to application developers what they want to use the beta branch for. The main problem is that we (as in Flathub admins) expect manifest to point to specific commit for reproducibility and currently there's no automation for updating that regularly.

[tuxayo]

Hi :)
A lot of benefit could be achieved just with an RC channel, not a nightly. Like now: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/41264-alpha-25-pre-releaserelease-candidate-build-testing/page/16/?tab=comments#comment-445469

How does that sound?

[tuxayo]

@StanleySweet is there another need in-between nighties and RCs? I don't know if mid cycle wider testing of the dev version is occasionally needed.

[StanleySweet]

@tuxayo Sorry don't check my github notifications often. I suppose https://releases.wildfiregames.com/rc/ could be used, although keep in mind that they might be deleted from time to time.

Well all versions should be as thoroughly tested as possible, although usually releases should be short enough for that to happen quickly.