Flatpak support in CI

[Benson Muite]

Ben Cooksley <bcooksley at kde.org> writes:

Hi Ben,

> Hi all,
>
> This evening I have fixed the broken Flatpak builds.
>
> This breakage was caused by a regression shipped by Flatpak itself, which
> Fedora incorporated and was too slow in shipping the fix for. See
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2528386 and
> https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/6818
>
> It only surfaced for us recently because we had previously been using an
> older version of Fedora for our build image.
>
> Updating that was necessary to get a new version of flatpak-builder, which
> fixed yet another regression that was causing the Flatpak KDE Runtime to
> fail to build.
>
> We had up until the Fedora update been forcibly downgrading from the most
> recent Flatpak Builder version available (which was old) to get a version
> that did not have the breakage in it to keep that working.
>
> This is a situation that is unsustainable, and the shipping of two
> regression containing releases in the last few months is, quite frankly,
> unacceptable. Not to mention a significant waste of my time when people ask
> me why it is broken - for which there are much better uses.
>
> Those who are advocates for Flatpak should have a serious discussion with
> the Flatpak developers regarding their release QA processes, which are not
> sufficient to catch regressions with significant impact.
>
> I would suggest they incorporate builds of some KDE Flatpaks as a minimum
> baseline.

Fedora does ship Kinoite, an immutable KDE desktop that uses
Flatpaks. As Fedora is community driven, occasionally one needs to ping
people to get bugs fixed.  There is a KDE SIG for Fedora:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE
co-ordination with them on Flatpaks and Kinoite might be one way to make
progress.

>
> Should this pattern of Flatpak releases containing severe regressions
> continue we will need to revisit the subject of Flatpak CI with a view to
> terminating it, including the Runtime builds.
>
> Regards,
> Ben

Regards,
Benson