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.
I signed up for the Haiku forums only to comment here. It is quite confusing for a newcomer like me that the official release is not supported anymore for what I suppose are the most important features. How about putting at least a message somewhere prominent mentioning this?
Right now it feels like buying what is advertised as a gas car, and then when you put gas in it you find out it’s actually diesel.
Ahoy @Carl
We understand your confusion, but would you answer a best possible honest answer to this questions ?
Is Haiku (the OS) - a product ?
Is the information about Haiku project in any detail is hidden or moreover secret or secretive ?
In case any open source project the best approach to learn more before jump in - read and ask more to know that what it is - is it for you and if it really it is for you based on information
respect the developers and community as well to complain about stuff
that was directly promised, but not fulfilled …
Otherwise, to check :
Did I everything on my part, so that I don’t feel cheated ?
and
to respect the creators and the community, to ask :
- if this happened to me - could you help me?
Believe me, this is a community that is built on respect, and there will be a lot of helpful people who will try to help you.
Of course, I know very well that today’s bloggers and vloggers - often just because they are teenagers, jump into all kinds of installations without checking what they are installing first, because what matters to them is the views, not the usability, and their followers are often jumped into things without thorough research, which is not true for them, because they have to learn new things, and they grew up differently in terms of digital culture, or patience, or making decisions for which they are willing to bear responsibility and possible consequencies.
Well, it is possible that the moderators will consider my answer to you as not fitting into the expected polite behavior that I recommended that you experience, if, instead of complaining indignantly, what you wrote as your first post here on our community forum, as if it were about an advertised product that does not provide what was promised, instead of wanting to use the result of a community development and ask for help from the community .. so I just wanted to point out this, so that you do not judge while showing yourself as a first introduction that is not exactly an exemplary community player in a community environment ..
This would be completely acceptable in the case of a commercial product, where if you paid for it, you can really expect to receive appropriate information about the given product.
This is also expected here in that you will receive detailed information about what you receive here, but please decide whether you have read enough and asked questions beforehand so that these answers reach you.
Don’t worry, I won’t participate anymore in these forums. You’ve made your point very clear.
A good solution to avoid unwanted newcomers could be to make the forum by invite only, or put a message somewhere that a person should preferably be a developer to participate.
Communication is always good, because otherwise how are people supposed to know? Just like communication could have helped avoid a lot of confusion for people trying Beta 5 and not understanding why it wasn’t possible to install apps.
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KitsunePrefecture’s message is rather overlong and verbose, and I don’t know that it answers your question (do note he’s also not a developer, so doesn’t speak for the development team.)
I agree we should have communicated this better, or better yet not broken the beta5 repositories. But we are short-handed on both systems administration and communication, so some things “fall by the wayside” as it were. Hopefully for the next release we will manage to do something differently.
Hello!
I do see you finally released the Beta 6! Good job!
Ye, in next time once you going to release a kind of Beta 7 or something different, please freeze the HaikuDepot state at the current release, and keep it at least until the release will finally happen, so, users will have a time before a new bigger release will happen.
I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could cache these somehow, and save us bandwidth?
Recently I finally managed to build a custom image where I pre-installed all the necessary dependencies, so the thing will never pull anything from HaikuDepot until I will manually rebuild the image (to refresh or install something extra).
So, good luck to you all, I watch sometims on the stuff, and I develop software for Haiku too, and I test various things here, so, if anything would happen, I will definitely report.
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So, that r1beta5 link on HaikuPorts should still work. I don’t like how we removed it and just added it back.
Scratch that. I just spoke to @waddlesplash and he gave me the reason. There’s an ABI / version breakage installing HaikuPorts packages from master to r1beta5 given its age. (and those issues could prevent upgrades from working)
We need to bump up having multiple repositories (one for each release branch).. it’s starting to become an issue.
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I never told anywhere you would be unwanted here, it is your decision if you do not come back.
I just pinponted that you not asked first, but started with a complaint as a customer at a cuustomer service – not as a newcomer at a community project.
That was my perspective.