Hello! I noticed that repos like https://eu.hpkg.haiku-os.org/haikuports/r1beta5/x86_64/current are no longer accessible, and result a failure. When I see the R1 Beta 5 on the main site is still being “latest”, I do see the active preparation for the Beta 6 release. That’s cool, however, old installations are now unusable in a term of installing ports. And this also broke my CI tasks based on Haiku’s VM image that installs packages from the Haiku Ports on every run. Did you moved old repos for releases to another path? Or you decided to completely nuke them? Or was that done unintentionally?
We don’t currently have the resources (mostly human effort) to maintain HaikuPorts repositories for two releases at once, unfortunately, so there’s only one set of repositories at present.
That means in the preparation period for a release, the repositories start accumulating packages that don’t work on the previous release. Those packages had been accumulating for a while, but recently a package showed up in the repositories which doesn’t have the proper version constraints, and so it was breaking people’s beta5 installations if they tried to update. That’s probably a bug in itself, but at this point we’ve rebuilt enough core packages that the repositories are not really useful for beta5 anymore.
At this point, you can probably install a beta6 “test candidate” image and work with that, as the beta6 release will just be some changes further along on that stream.
I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could cache these somehow, and save us bandwidth?
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I suppose, it would be fine to just preserve the state of old releases and don’t update that (since you don’t need to maintain these, let them rot in a quite, while working on the latest thing) after new release is done. Or do kill the old build once new rerelase is finally released. Just to give people a time to be ready.
A good note, I would like to build my own image for the CI where everything necessary is already preinstalled, ye. Actually this is a problem for both of us: your bandwidth, and my stability: sometimes thirdparty (relative to me) servers often fails or refuse connections and this of course breaks the build. Even when packages are pulled my own servers, the connection also might fail in a random moment. For now I disabled auto-builds completely just because they are failing due to described problem (the thing will be built manually when I directly trigger the build by myself).
For the case of Linux builds I made a pile of my own Docker containers where I pre-installed everything the necessary, otherwise PPA is a big lover to fail.
We should look into doing this, yes (especially now that we have more storage space than we used to.) But we aren’t yet set up for it, and establishing that will take some work.
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Good luck!
Anyway, for the future, just, until the stable release is really released and placed on the front page, don’t nuke repos for old releases. And do nuke these are really old and obsolete and nobody really will use them.