Hi all,
I'd like to shortly mention the GitHub Releases here, just in case you do not know
this GitHub feature...
GitHub can not only host the sources for your project, but it can be also used for
distributing the built binaries. For YaST that is not much useful as we use OBS for
that, but many upstream projects use this.
I tried to use this feature for publishing a testing DUD with a fix. Of course, you
can always attach the DUD to bugzilla. But that's not easy to use, you have to
download and host the file on some server [1]. That's annoying.
Example:
--------
I built a testing DUD which can be used directly from GitHub with this boot option:
dud=https://github.com/yast/yast-update/releases/download/bsc_1200127/dud.cpio.g...
You do not need to download anything, it just works!
The only minor drawback is that the URL is pretty long and you need to carefully
write that on the boot command line.
You might use an URL shortener service, it tried to minify the URL to
dud=https://bit.ly/3OoevuJ
and it works fine. But you should be careful when using shortened URLs,
you do not know where they actually point to. And even if it looks OK
the author can later edit it and change the target to point to some malicious
file...
Note:
In this particular case I did it mainly for testing purpose, this proposed fix is for
just one customer so it does not make much sense to publish it at GitHub. They will
most likely use the DUD from bugzilla.
But if you have a bug fix which will be used by more users then this GitHub
feature can be very useful.
How to use it?
--------------
1. Go to the main GitHub page of the project, click the "Releases" section header
in the right side bar
2. Clink the "Create a new release" button
3. Select the Git branch name and tag to which this release will be bound to.
A tag is required, if the respective tag does not exit just write some,
GitHub will automatically create it from the selected branch
4. At the bottom there is an area for attaching the binaries, just click it and
select the built files to upload
5. If this is just a testing build (code not merged yet), select the "pre-release"
option so the users know this is not the final version and might be changed
later
6. Press "Publish release"... and that's it!
Enjoy! :-)
GitHub Packages Note
--------------------
There is a similar feature called GitHub Packages. But that supports only releasing
"packages" in some special registry services, like container registry, npm registry,
rubygem registry, etc...
That cannot host arbitrary packages or files. See [2] for more details.
Ladislav
[1] For testing purposes you can always use something trivial like
ruby -run -ehttpd . -p8000
and use the http://