Original installation channel must be visible, updates listed accordingly

[snomos]

Taskcluster is working for all lang-xxx repos, and signing and notarization is working again. That is, we have now a bunch of new nightlies available to us. Except not:

Expected: available for installation

Divvun Manager 2.0.1.

[Eijebong]

Doesn't that show that it's already been updated?

[snomos]

Yes, that would be the expected behavior. But the installed speller is this:

That is, a more than one year old speller (I assume the latest stable release).

Cf also #10 .

[Eijebong]

I wonder if the manager thinks it's the same version because 4.3.0 matches

[snomos]

I think that I was fooled by having installed the original package using the "stable" channel, which makes any newer releases in the nightly channel unavailable.

I will reformulate the bug as follows:

Original installation channel must be visible, updates listed accordingly.

[snomos]

More on this:

• as updates are installed based on the active channel when a package was first installed, it must be possible to see which channel is active for a given package
• listed updates should be listed based on the active channel (updates in other channels could be listed as well, in gray or something, to make it clear that they exist, but are not available via the active channel)

[snomos]

@dylanhand Now that DM is building as it should again, and there is no further direct action to be taken on #41 (except adding logging), it would be good to take a look at this issue.

[dylanhand]

@snomos will do. I'll see if there are obvious places to add logging and then look into how we can indicate from which channel a package is installed.

[snomos]

I think it would be useful to have at least the following information directly readable in the list view in Divvun Manager:

• installed version (with active channel)
• we need column headers in the list view, so that we can tell users exactly what they are seeing, and also make the list view sortable by clicking the column headers (cf Add "Sort" option to "All Repositories" view #44 )

[dylanhand]

Taskcluster is working for all lang-xxx repos, and signing and notarization is working again. That is, we have now a bunch of new nightlies available to us. Except not:

Expected: available for installation

Divvun Manager 2.0.1.

The reason no updates are listed in this situation is because the nightly version number is equal to (or less than) the current stable release version.

One solution is to bump the version number once a release has made it to the stable channel. It could be argued that this is what should have been done all along since, once version 1.0.0 is released, you're no longer building nightly versions of 1.0.0, but rather nightly versions of forthcoming versions such as 1.0.1, 1.1.0, etc.

These steps were taken to test this:

1. Install Inari Sami spellchecker from the stable channel

2. Switch to nightly channel, where current version is 1.0.5-nightly.20240517T030637371Z. It shows "No Updates" because the version, 1.0.5, is the latest version, and it's installed (the current implementation of DM ignores the "-nightly.2024..." part.

3. Bump the speller patch version to produce a new nightly version, then refresh DM. This now shows that an update is available since 1.0.6 > 1.0.5:

---

TLDR

If you want nightly versions to be installable over stable versions, the easy fix that requires no changes is to bump the nightly's version number. The user will still have the option not to update if they choose: they simply don't update when switched to the nightly channel.

---

This solution however does not address what this issue has morphed into, which is to display the channel a package was installed from.

So now, given this new information, the question is: is the current implementation acceptable (i.e., bump the nightly version number to make them available to install over stable versions)?

Let me know if you'd still like a column that lists the active channel from which a package is installed. As discussed in our meeting, I've worked on an experimental feature that lets us get the non-truncated package version (e.g. 1.0.0-nightly... instead of just 1.0.0) from the Info.plist, which would help us determine from which channel a package is installed.

One unknown is whether we can accurately determine whether a package was installed from the beta channel. Packages from the nightly channel always have "nightly" in their version string, so that's easy. If there's a similar requirement for beta packages (e.g. they always contain something like -rc1), that too will be easy. If not, we may have to figure out a way to identify packages installed from the beta channel.

[snomos]

@dylanhand before we can answer the question of whether we need an active channel column, we need to clarify the following:

when do automatic updates occur? The intended behaviour is that within the same channel, new releases should be installed automatically (the installed update will be available at latest after computer restart, due to macOS caching speller lexicons in memory, so an app restart might not be enough). Do automatic updates also occur across channels if version numbers are changed as suggested above?

At least within one and the same channel, automatic updates do happen — the SMN update mentioned above got installed without me doing anything:

$ ls -l /Library/Services/smn.bundle/Contents/Resources/smn.zhfst  
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  10185021 May 20 16:42 /Library/Services/smn.bundle/Contents/Resources/smn.zhfst

$ echo nuvviDspeller | divvunspell suggest -a /Library/Services/smn.bundle/Contents/Resources/smn.zhfst
Reading from stdin...
Input: nuvviDspeller		[INCORRECT]
Divvun speller for Inari Sami		1
smn, desktop, version 1.0.6, 20.05.2024-1341		2
Built using HFST 3.16.0		3

I have now bumped the FAO speller in a similar manner; I have it installed from the stable channel ATM, let's see whether it is updated automatically to nightly if the truncated, semver version number is bumped.

The plan has all along been that automatic updates do occur as follows:

• always when new releases are available in the same channel as previously installed
• never across release channels

The confusion arises for people when they don't remember/see which channel a package was installed from, and expect it to be automatically updated, but then it does not.

[snomos]

Faroese update out (1.1.2-nightly), but not installed, and not listed as installable:

I have this installed:

$ ls -l /Library/Services/*.bundle/Contents/Resources/*.zhfst  
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel   5276913 Oct  8  2021 /Library/Services/fo.bundle/Contents/Resources/fo.zhfst

$ echo nuvviDspeller | divvunspell suggest -a /Library/Services/fo.bundle/Contents/Resources/fo.zhfst 
Reading from stdin...
Input: nuvviDspeller		[INCORRECT]
Divvun speller for Faroese		1
fo, desktop, version 1.1.1, 08.10.2021-0722		2
Built using HFST 3.15.5		3

That is, for Faroese, the update is not installed automatically, and it is also not listed as manually installable, despite having a higher (truncated/semver) version number.