This will allow to also check the list of runtime builds. We could see an
example in a report (#8993) where someone had the latest flatpak build of GIMP
but an older build of the runtime flatpak. So they had a bug because of a
dependency which got updated since then.
Sometimes we want to make quick tests on old versions of GIMP.
Rebuilding from source is definitely still an option, yet with flatpak,
we have many past builds available easily to us (at time of writing: 19
stable builds, 12 dev point-release builds and at least 3 nightlies —
though I seem to have issues with signatures on gnome-nightly right now,
so maybe there are more!).
There are some command lines needed to check the build history, then to
install a specific build, which I explained in developer docs (see
devel-docs/debugging-tips.txt, section "Testing older GIMP versions").
Yet it's clearly cumbersome and slow so I wrote this script today to
automatize the process a bit.
Running simply this command will list all available releases on the
Flathub repository (adding --beta or --nightly will list the development
releases and nightly builds instead):
$ tools/flatpak-releases
The listing will contain a topic describing the build as well as the
date, all this prefixed by a number. For instance, this is an excerpt of
the output for the dev releases:
$ tools/flatpak-releases --beta
0: Update dependencies (127a0fa7) [2022-01-13 16:59:43 +0000]
1: Issue #106: File->Create->From Screenshot not working. (9c831b14) [2021-12-14 21:46:52 +0000]
2: Release GIMP 2.99.8. (908bf5b0) [2021-10-20 20:29:00 +0000]
3: Release GIMP 2.99.6. (e04355dd) [2021-04-26 14:08:32 +0000]
…
The last build updates dependencies, the previous one fixes some
specific issue and the 2 previous ones are point releases.
Now say I needed to test/compare some behavior with how it was in 2.99.6
(e.g. to verify a regression), I would then run:
$ tools/flatpak-releases --beta -3
This would install this specific dev build number 3. In just 2
easy-to-remember commands and a few seconds, we can therefore list and
install specific Flatpak builds.
Jehan