OpenMW Nightly builds

[jvoisin]

Please do, it's a great idea!

[KnightoftheWind]

I'm just surprised it wasn't done sooner, the stable Flatpak is fine enough but if you want to be on the bleeding edge it's rather cumbersome to install the dev/nightly version. Even if it was only updated every week or so, it'd be nice to have.

[Ace (SWE)]

The main issue is just that Flathub isn't really designed for it (having more than two active branches), so we'd likely have to have a separate OpenMW application for the nightly/CI builds. The main and beta branches of the existing application are already used for release and RC.

Alternatively, hosting a small flatpak repository for our CI builds could also be done.

[KnightoftheWind]

Maybe RC's could become Appimages, and dev builds could be Flatpaks in it's place?.

[AnyOldName3]

There are a bunch of places where a Flatpak is much lower-hassle than any of the other options. For example, you can just install stuff with a couple of clicks on a Steam Deck if it's on Flathub, but it's not got support for Snaps or AppImages.

[Ace (SWE)]

I don't think anyone would say no to AppImage versions of the generic Linux build, but I also know that I'm not going to be the one to build them - since people on older distros wouldn't be able to run them if I did so. (They still have runtime dependencies on the libc version)

Flatpak itself wouldn't have any issue at all with also distributing nightly/per-commit builds, it'd just require hosting a separate repository off of Flathub to store them - as Flathub currently only offers two active branches.
If more people are interested, I could definitely set up a Flatpak repository for distributing CI builds from, got plenty of available storage and bandwidth in terms of just serving static files like such.

[KnightoftheWind]

Appimages are an option at least, I know RC builds are released far less often than nightly/dev builds, so it would make sense to just produce an Appimage every time an RC build is made public. Since dev builds are updated daily, a Flatpak would be put to better use.

This forum isn't very popular it seems, so I don't think you'll see 100 Linux chads give their explicit thumbs up for a new Flatpak, but I know it'd be very useful for those who don't currently use an Arch or Ubuntu-based distro. If it can be done, I hope it will be.

[psi29a]

Weird that "chad" is being used in this context.

If we can automate a thing, we should. Though I think having one way to package an generic build is better than trying to support everything.

This is why we let downstream do the packaging for us for a lot of reasons.