If you use nightly builds

[vitorgalvao]

For the people who use nightly builds, since most of the time the urls pointing to these are numbered (so you can’t simply have it always use the latest version) and they get outdated very quickly, what would be your preferred way to manage them?

I feel like the current method (none official, it just varies depending on the person that submitted it) is somewhat broken, and that we should try to get a consensus on one way of doing it.

Ideally we could get a link that would be always up-to-date, linking to the latest version, whatever that might be, even if from an unofficial (but trusted) source, but that does not seem to be an existing option, currently.

Would you rather a version is added at any point with latest and no_checksum, and then routinely change the link for the latest version, would you think it’d work better if the exact version is added with the checksum, or have any other suggestion?

[saulshanabrook]

Are you suggesting adding version numbers to nightly formulas? Take Chrome Canary for example. What would you change with this cask?

[nanoxd]

@saulshanabrook Chrome Canary follows the ideal case. There are several nightly distributions that append the build number to the .dmg/.zip thus causing the url to change every day.

[saulshanabrook]

I think it is unwise to freeze nightly version numbers (and checksums) in this repo. Practically, it is a whole lot of work to update them. Which means that it is very likely that will be out of date. Also, having the version numbers in cask provides minimal benefit, since upgrades are handled through the app itself.

So my approach would be to create the download link on the fly. I don't have any great ideas about how to do this. For firefox-aurora we could try to parse https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-aurora/

[vitorgalvao]

I think it is unwise to freeze nightly version numbers (and checksums) in this repo. Practically, it is a whole lot of work to update them. Which means that it is very likely that will be out of date. Also, having the version numbers in cask provides minimal benefit, since upgrades are handled through the app itself.

You’re repeating the first post. Yes, they are a pain to update, yes, it’s particularly useless since they change so often, yes, making it work automatically would be the best option. No, we don’t currently have an implemented solution for that, and we need(ed) to find a solution in the meantime. I’m not suggesting anything, I’m asking; since I don’t usually use nightly builds, I’d like the opinion of people who do. Like @nanoxd pointed out, Chrome Canary is not a problem, this issue is regarding the apps that are, not all nightly builds. There’s been some progress regarding multiple versions, so this was a lot more relevant when it was first posted.

[saulshanabrook]

@vitorgalvao What do you think about parsing https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-aurora/ for the version number?

[vitorgalvao]

@saulshanabrook Anyway that makes it always up-to-date is fine. I remember there was another cask, some time ago that actually used a regex to always get the latest version. We discussed and liked the idea, but ended up not going further with it. Unfortunately, I don’t remember anything else about it, to find the discussion.

[vitorgalvao]

Closing as we never really got anywhere with the question, and have been handling nightly builds relatively well.