Base pmOS on Alpine's latest stable release instead of edge?

postmarketOS is based on Alpine's edge (as in "bleeding edge") branch right now, which has unexpected breakage from time to time (e.g. when they update a library, and we need to rebuild against it). Of course this slows down postmarketOS development.

Roughly every half year, there's a stable release of Alpine and the last one (3.8) was on 2018-06-26 (so less than a month ago). The only problem from our perspective is, that the stable versions don't have packages from the testing folder of Alpine's aports. For instance, we would need to build qt5-qtwebengine again, and we need to make a list of all other packages we are using from testing right now.

@bshah: if we did the switch to Alpine 3.8 stable, then QT would be frozen at 5.10 until the next Alpine release. Would that be a problem?

mentioned in issue pmbootstrap#1593 (closed)

By Oliver Smith on 2018-07-23T21:34:58

It might be good to combine this with pmbootstrap#383 (closed), so we can make the user switch between releases easily, and tag the APKBUILD repository according to the Alpine releases.

By Bart Ribbers on 2018-07-25T17:50:42

Yeah, that would be great in the long run. I'm not sure if we can do both at once though.

By Oliver Smith on 2018-07-25T20:19:33

I guess with the CI setup maintaining a pmos-stable and pmos-testing version wouldn't be that hard. But it would require quite some infrastructure changes to make it work initially. Having pmbootstrap#383 (closed) fixed first would make it easier.

I don't think the packages in the pmbootstrap aports would be very different between the two versions so it's mainly maintaining two binary repositories and a stable branch in the split aports repository.

By Martijn Braam on 2018-07-26T14:32:34

mentioned in issue pmbootstrap#383 (closed)

By Oliver Smith on 2018-08-18T06:17:55

mentioned in merge request osk-sdl!80 (closed)

By Oliver Smith on 2018-08-28T19:34:24

mentioned in issue pmbootstrap#1625 (closed)

By Oliver Smith on 2018-09-01T22:05:29

moved from pmbootstrap#1622 (closed)

By Bart Ribbers on 2018-09-08T22:21:50

mentioned in issue pmbootstrap#1662 (closed)

By Oliver Smith on 2018-09-24T21:01:52

mentioned in issue postmarketos.org#83 (closed)

By Oliver Smith on 2018-10-03T19:41:27

I'm still on the side that switching to Alpine stable wouldn't neccessarily improve our situation as unfortunately a lot of packages only exist in Alpine testing and we need a lot of those packages for ours as far as I know.

By Luca Weiss on 2018-10-04T17:48:13

I'd rather compile a lot of additional packages on our own, than dealing with spontaneous breakage every few weeks. With the GCC, distcc, QT, ... updates I can easily spend a week on only fixing that stuff and getting nothing else done (not even answering issues/merge requests, like it happens now). When we get a better build infrastructure, the building should not be much of a problem anyway.

Wherever possible it would also be good if we got packages, that we really use, from testing into community, so they are available in stable Alpine releases as well.

By Oliver Smith on 2018-10-08T05:02:36

mentioned in issue wiki#19 (closed)

By Oliver Smith on 2018-12-10T06:43:02

i think being on alpine edge is more better then stable.i use manjaro(arch) in my system . their way of release is great . but i think @ollieparanoid is right. pmOS needs some other works done . i would suggest that two releases will be great . users in stable and developers in edge.

@bshah as a qt developer i think 5.10 is enough for most of the application . but as qt 5.12 LTS is released it will be great to have all the packages build against that one.

i think two release should be done with the qt 5.12 lts.

By rahmanshaber on 2018-12-10T13:29:56

mentioned in issue #49 (closed)

By Oliver Smith on 2019-04-12T21:41:16

mentioned in issue postmarketos.org#110 (closed)

By Bart Ribbers on 2019-06-16T14:17:25

marked this issue as related to postmarketos.org#110 (closed)

By Martijn Braam on 2019-06-16T14:30:25

Personally I think it's best to be based on both really.

1. A "stable" postmarketOS based on the latest Alpine stable. This will include some packages from Alpine's testing repo until they are moved to a stable Alpine release. Fixes are backported from "unstable" to here when required.
2. An "unstable" postmarketOS based on Alpine edge. Main development (new devices, new packages, new features, etc) will happen here. Once a new Alpine stable release is out, we'll fork this version into the basis of the next "stable".

We could set some minimum required functionality per device to be moved to "stable" on a new release like working display, usb and wifi.

By Bart Ribbers on 2019-06-16T14:36:18

mentioned in issue #336 (closed)

By Daniele Debernardi on 2019-08-08T22:50:05

Since this issue was mentioned recently, here's the current roadmap:

1. Get new build infra structure going. Since the last blog post, I'm dedicating multiple hours each week to push this forward.
2. Get a postmarketOS version going that is based on Alpine's latest stable branch, probably roughly what @PureTryOut described above.

For more verbosity, one can read related paragraphs from recent blog posts:

• https://postmarketos.org/blog/2019/01/16/600-days-of-postmarketOS/#new-srht-based-binary-repository
• https://postmarketos.org/blog/2019/06/23/two-years/#sourcehut-srht

By Oliver Smith on 2019-08-17T09:27:53