"Update native host app: instructions" on Debian - need clarification on versioning

[eyalzek]

This message is coming from [1]. I added some logging and found that my system returns 3000007, whereas the latest version [2] is defined as 3001000.

Could you clarify how this versioning works? The latest native release [3] is 3.1.0, I'm guessing that this is correlated to 3001000.

However, my installed version is 3.7.2 (through the debian sources):

$ apt policy webext-browserpass 
webext-browserpass:
  Installed: 3.7.2-1+b20
  Candidate: 3.7.2-1+b20
  Version table:
 *** 3.7.2-1+b20 400
        400 http://deb.debian.org/debian testing/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

This is the latest version available on the repos [4]. It seems like there's some kind of mismatch in versioning between Debian and browserpass?
3.7.2 matches a release of the extension [5], but not of the native host. Was there no update to the webext-browserpass package since 3.0.7 of the native host app?

Is the solution to manually install the native host? If so, this should probably be documented somewhere.

[1] https://github.com/browserpass/browserpass-extension/blob/master/src/popup/interface.js#L69
[2] https://github.com/browserpass/browserpass-extension/blob/master/src/helpers.js#L20
[3] https://github.com/browserpass/browserpass-native/releases/tag/3.1.0
[4] https://packages.debian.org/testing/web/webext-browserpass
[5] https://github.com/browserpass/browserpass-extension/releases/tag/3.7.2

[maximbaz]

Hello! Native host and browser extensions are generally versioned independently, but on very rare occasions as extension needs more features from the native host, there would be some dependency (that e.g. version X of the extension needs at least version Y of the native host).

As of right now, the latest version of the extension is 3.10.1 and of the native host is 3.1.0.

We are not in control of distro packages, so unfortunately if they are not maintained, the only other way is for you to install the necessary things manually. 3.7.2 has been released on Jan 19, 2021, so yeah I suppose it's fair to say, that the debian package is abandoned now, and should not be used if you want latest versions.

You'll find plenty of documentation on how to install the native host in its README over at https://github.com/browserpass/browserpass-native

[eyalzek]

Thanks for the quick answer - I created a PR [1] to update the README.

[1] browserpass/browserpass-native#158