Question about the workflow

[ThomasBreuer]

I understand the release workflow as follows:

1. One merges a pull request for the package, such that PackageInfo.g contains a new version number.
2. One runs release-pkg in order to create the archive of the new version.

The idea is that PackageInfoURL and ArchiveURL in PackageInfo.g point to the github URLs in question.
GAP's automatic package updater sees the new version of PackageInfo.g already after step 1., before the archive gets created in step 2.
Thus the package updater (and anybody else who wants to get the latest version of the package in question) gets confused if step 2 is not executed.

Wouldn't it be safer to decouple the two steps?
For that, we would need "another place" for the PackageInfo.g file mentioned in PackageInfoURL, and release-pkg would have to copy PackageInfo.g to this place at the time when it uploads the archive.

[stertooy]

(I'm not sure whether you mean the PackageDistro repo or the PackageManager package by "GAP's automatic package updater", but I think the answer largely remains the same.)

I'm assuming that the pull request in step 1 relates to the default (master/main) branch of the GitHub repository. After that PR is merged, the PackageInfo.g file in the repository has a new version number. But the PackageInfo.g file hosted on GitHub Pages (corresponding to a file in the gh-pages branch) is left untouched, and still corresponds to the latest release.

PackageDistro, when scanning for updates, compares its own version of PackageInfo.g with the version found at PackageInfoURL - and that URL usually points to the file hosted on GitHub Pages. Thus, it should not see the new version until the gh-pages branch gets updated with the new PackageInfo.g file, which is usually done as part of the release process. In fact, the update-gh-pages action deliberately extracts the PackageInfo.g file from the latest release instead of from the repository to avoid such problems.

So I don't think there's a problem, unless the gh-pages branch gets updated manually? Or if someone sets PackageInfoURL to something that gets updated before a release, like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gap-packages/packagename/refs/heads/master/PackageInfo.g.