How to track gitoxide releases

[kpcyrd]

Summary 💡

Hello!

I maintain the Arch Linux package of gitoxide and I'm having trouble keeping track of "what's the latest version of gitoxide (the program)". :)

The release notifications are unfortunately way too noisy for me to subscribe to and I noticed there's no clear pattern of tags. There are tags like v0.30.0 and v0.34.0, no version tags for everything in between (correction: there are tags, just no github releases) but uploads to gitoxide on crates.io.

I've settled on using this nvchecker config:

[gitoxide]
source = "cratesio"
github = "gitoxide"

But a user has tagged the gitoxide 0.33.0 as out-of-date, pointing to the v0.34.0 release tag which is missing on crates.io however. I also noticed there's a gix crate (which is the actual program that Arch Linux ships, along with the ein binary) that's already on version 0.58.0.

Guidance much appreciated! :)

Motivation 🔦

Provide the latest version of gitoxide to Arch Linux users.

[Byron]

Thanks for sharing your experience, it's much valued and will maybe help in making improvements.

In general, the v\d+\.\d+\.\d+ pattern is the one to look for when there is interest in packaging the top-level binaries, as this tag pattern is for them only, the top-level crate. All other tags and releases are prefixed with gix-* and usually happen before a new top-level release is created. There isn't anything I think I can do about that, unfortunately, but maybe there is a GitHub feature I could use but am not aware of to improve the situation.

The current release is special. v0.33 uses gix v0.57, but an intermediate gix crate release was created for other reason as version 0.58 that isn't used by any top-level crate release. v0.34 was recently released and has binaries on GitHub, but due to human error (mine) the accompanying gix 0.59 release had to be yanked, along with a couple of other crates which ended up breaking gix v0.58 and thus the world.

With the next release, v0.35, I expect a new gix v0.60 release and everything should be back to normal.

I hope that at least explains the situation even though I can't over any improvements at this time for lack of options. Maybe it's clearer though on how to track top-level releases though?

[EliahKagan]

but maybe there is a GitHub feature I could use but am not aware of to improve the situation.

I've opened #1692 for this.