Limiting what is in the appstream

[Dan Nicholson]

On Wed, Oct 5, 2016 at 7:25 AM, Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com> wrote:
> I have gotten requests from Endless about having a way to limit what is
> in the appstream branch, because they want to store all the apps in a
> single repo, but some apps are targeting an older OS version, and some
> a newer, and you only want to see the newer ones. Is that correct?

I'm not sure what the actual request was, but we might want to do
something like that. The way we're handling the stable release is by
adding a compat ref that points to the current minor series. I.e.,
systems are setup to pull from the eos3 branch, but the eos3 branch
head is actually just a copy of the eos3.0 branch head. Later when we
move to eos3.1, the eos3 branch logic will be changed to follow that
series. This is similar to what you might do with a "stable" vs
"3.20", "3.22", etc in GNOME. I.e., pulling from the stable branch
would always get you on the latest stable series.

Of course, the downside of this approach is that we have multiple
copies of the same information in the appstream branch (and in the
summary, but that's a different story). I.e., each app has appstream
data for eos3 and eos3.0, but it's identical except for the bundle
info. In my mind, we want to keep both refs (and eos3.1 ref when that
series is created) so that you can legitimately install flatpaks from
either an explicit minor series or the major stable series. Whether we
need all that information in the appstream branch available to
gnome-software, I'm not sure. Quite possibly we only want the eos3
major series refs in the appstream so that gnome-software will only
ever offer the current stable version to you. Advanced users could
still install explicit minor series versions using flatpak directly,
of course.

I haven't given it much more thought than that, though.

--
Dan