Re: Moving existing ostree users to a new branch - take 2

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Sat, May 13, 2017 at 8:35 AM, Colin Walters <walters verbum org> wrote:

On Sat, May 13, 2017, at 08:04 AM, Matthias Clasen wrote:

The use case in which this has come up for flatpak so far is changes in the repository hosting. For example, Alex put up a repo for recipes early on, but then I made my own, so I wouldn't have to bother him with builds. And now, I'm moving recipes to flathub.  I don't want to leave my users stranded during those repository migrations.

Right, that's a repository redirection, not a *ref* change (or a GPG key change, right?).  Something that could be equally well handled by plain old HTTP 301 redirects.  We could potentially change the client to honor HTTP 301 and actually change the repo URL.

 

Sure, if you have enough control over the hosting to put a redirect in place. In the example of recipes, the hosting was done by abusing github pages. I don't know if I can get a redirect there.
 

But that aside, I'm more asking about *ref* changes, since if there aren't any production use cases for changing refs,

we could add a binding.

I guess a potential ref change scenario is renaming a flatpak app.  That's much more likely to happen

for flatpaks than it would be for ostree-for-host scenario.  Has that come up yet?

Perhaps we could generalize the "ref commit binding" model to support more than one ref.

It does come up with flathub insofar as flathub insists on calling the flatpak branch it builds 'stable', while I had chosen '1.0' in my repo. So my app is not just moving repositories, but the ref changes from app/org.gnome.Recipes/x86_64/1.0 to app/org.gnome.Recipes/x86_64/stable. I'm not sure I know of use cases for changing refs inside a single repository. Maybe you want to have a 'stable' branch that points at 3.24 for a while and then gets redirected at 3.26 when that goes stable ?