[Feature]: Corrective releases (revisions?)

[twaik]

Feature description

Hi. Every dev of termux knows that partial upgrades are not supported. But after installation termux unpacks bootstrap with outdated packages and installing other packages without updating installed environment causes errors and confuses people.

Additional information

Maybe it would be better to make correvtive releases for bootstrap without updating termux-app code. termux-packages has revision mechanism, maybe it would be better to implement something simillar here. It will let people use termux without making pkg update && pkg upgrade right after installing the application.

Creating new revision and uploading it can be triggered by updating packages contained in bootstrap so it may be not triggered manually.

Thank you.

[sylirre]

Eliminating the need of modifying code and running pkg upgrade on the first launch is only possible with online bootstrap archives.

Otherwise users still would be required to run pkg upgrade because F-Droid lags for a few days between actual release and APK publish. The GitHub debug builds are not releases and should never be promoted as such - their signature key and passphrase published in repo for development purposes.

[tareksander]

Maybe online bootstraps can be used when available and not on a metered connection, and otherwise the included ones as a fallback?

[agnostic-apollo]

After next version I plan on working on making bootstrap installation configurable, including custom bootstraps from url or local storage and do plan on adding support to install latest bootstrap from termux releases or ask users if they want to run pkg upgrade, issue with that is release bootstraps are sometimes broken, so someone else would have to ensure they are working every week, since I don't have time for that.

Termux will be moving away from storing apt/pacman package manager/variant in apk itself, and it will be stored in bootstrap zip manifest.json, so that termux can allow switching managers at runtime instead of requiring a new apk build. It will also be required to support multiple rootfs, since different rootfs can have different bootstraps, assuming it's worthwhile to add.

[tareksander]

It should be possible to make instrumented tests for the app that get run in GitHub Actions, right? The Action would build Termux with the to-be-published bootstraps and then run the tests and only release the bootstraps when the tests pass. That way no one has to test it manually every week. I made a test like this for my proposed plugin system, so I think I could set up tests for the bootstraps.

[agnostic-apollo]

Automated testing is possible, would have to test bootstrap packages too, etc.