New Annex to Source the Latest Release of a GitHub Project

[alberti42]

I created a new annex that does what is in the title.

This annex introduces a new ICE modifier, latest-release, which resolves the most recent GitHub release tag and assigns it to ice[ver]. It is especially useful when no prebuilt binaries are available and compiling from source is required, while still ensuring that the checked-out code corresponds to a stable, released version.

The annex and documentation can be found here: https://github.com/alberti42/zinit-annex-latest-release

@pschmitt: I would be happy if the annex were hosted on https://github.com/zdharma-continuum. If you also think other people may find it useful, would you then create an empty project where I can make a pull request? This would give the annex much more visibility and could benefit other people.

[pschmitt]

Thanks for creating this.
Important notice: I haven't yet gone through the implementation of the annex.

My main issue with "promoting" this to the official org is twofold.

For once, there's maintainability. Having been less and less reliant on zinit myself I wouldn't want to just blindly take on the burden, the zdharma-continuum universe is quite large already and honestly hard to maintain. There's a lot of crap in here, and I find it difficult to find the time to do it properly. Nowadays, it's mostly just me. There's an "easy fix" fix for this: do you want to participate? I can shell out an invite to the org.

Second issue: this seems to be very much similar to the from"gh-r" ice. Please educate me on what this brings vs the "official" ice, why it should be an annex and not part of zinit core :)

[alberti42]

Hey Philipp,

Thank for the reply!

For once, there's maintainability. ... Nowadays, it's mostly just me.

I can relate so much with what you are saying.

There's an "easy fix" fix for this: do you want to participate? I can shell out an invite to the org.

This would be cool. I don't know how much time I can dedicate to it, but occasionally for sure. I already spent my hours fighting through the code of zinit. My main interest would be to create a clean code base, clearly on some experimental branch, and try to invite other users to give feedback. If we sufficient feedback, at some point, maybe in a year, we could have a much better, expandable code. Just simply having clean code, documented allows one to avoid so many bugs and mistakes.

Second issue: this seems to be very much similar to the from"gh-r" ice. Please educate me on what this brings vs the "official" ice, why it should be an annex and not part of zinit core :)

Yes and no. But maybe I missed some feature / ICE. Yes, you can use gh-r and I do use this ICE as much as I can. But sometimes, there is no release for my macOS platform. Then you have to compile from the source code. What bothered me is that you cannot pin to the latest release. When you work with source code, you are downloading the version in the HEAD of main. This can contain experimental code, can change very often. So you don't want to recompile all your plugins every time you run zinit update to keep following changes occurring over night. These may also not be very stable / tested yet.

So, I really wanted to have a way to pin to the source code as of the latest release. Sure, one could expand my annex to pin other previous releases, which could also be useful. Maybe it could be done in a future.

why it should be an annex and not part of zinit core :)

Yes, I thought this feature is quite important and should be part of the core. This is what I initially try to do. But the code was "bad" (allow me the term) that was very hard to make surgical changes without essentially rewriting it or making super ugly patches, like injecting functions here and there.

The annex is essentially what the second option does. It injects some functions in the flow. But I thought, it is not so dirthy because it is kept separated and it is meant to run like this.

Otherwise I tried to implement the patch in a clean way, but I ended up to change / rewrite so much code, that I was afraid, you would never accept the PR in reasonable time.

Let me know your thoughts. Perhaps you can also test it. It works for me.. but you never know with zinit.. :-)

Thanks again for the love and support to zinit!