Since publishing moved to CI on merge, a package whose PKGBUILD never
changes while its source moves was never rebuilt: omarchy-dev and
omarchy-settings-dev followed quattro through "#branch=" and a pkgver()
function, and nothing in this repository changed when quattro did. The
host timers that used to notice are off, so edge fell days behind.
The rule now: no git source without a commit or tag pin
(tests/pinned-sources.sh, run in CI). A package that has to follow a
branch declares a git_branch upstream watch, and the pin moves through
the same PR/build/publish path as every other version bump.
Watch (helpers/upstream-watch.py)
git_branch gains tag_pattern: the newest release tag in the pinned
commit's own history, exposed as {tag}/{version}/{distance}, so a
branch build is versioned <tag>.r<n>.g<sha>, above the release it
follows and below the next one. One blobless clone per branch per
run, shared by every package on it. min_release_age selects the
newest commit older than the window, so a push burst builds once.
Lane (helpers/package-metadata.sh, bin/sync-upstream --lane)
"auto_merge": true moves a package from the reviewed 6-hourly sync
PR to the unattended lane. Packages pinned from the same branch move
together: a failure on one restores the others and fails the group,
so the dev pair can never ship from two quattro commits.
Tracker (.github/workflows/track-branches.yml)
Every two hours: pin, open one PR with a GitHub App token, enable
auto-merge. Branch protection still gates the merge on result,
self-tests and build-isolation. A tip that fails to build stays an
open red PR until the next tick supersedes it. The App is required:
a PR opened with GITHUB_TOKEN has its checks held for approval and
its auto-merge would not fire publish.yml.
The reviewed workflows (sync-upstream, sync-rebuilds) open their PRs
with the same App so their builds start without a maintainer clicking
"Approve workflows to run"; without the App they fall back to
GITHUB_TOKEN and behave as before.
Recipes
The dev pair pins _commit and a real sha256sum, keeps the OMARCHY_SRC
override, and drops pkgver(). Its r-number stays the branch's total
commit count because the published history used it and pacman must
never see the version go down. omasnap-git is new: omacom/omasnap
main, versioned <tag>.r<distance>.g<sha>, provides/conflicts omasnap.
Three things kept the upstream sync PR (#589) from ever finishing a build:
Scoped dispatches wiped the shared PR. A workflow_dispatch with `packages`
regenerates only those packages from master, and pushing that to
auto/sync-upstream replaced 38 pending updates with one. Scoped runs now
push to their own auto/sync-{upstream,rebuilds}-<packages> branch and PR;
scheduled runs keep the shared branch.
build-approved stopped working after the first bot push. A GITHUB_TOKEN
push creates pull_request runs held for approval but no pull_request_target
run, so approve-pr.yml never saw it: its last run on the branch was the
label itself (2026-09-25T19:26), and each of the next four syncs sat at
action_required. The sync workflows now release the held runs for the
commit they just pushed, from a separate job holding actions: write, and
only for their own bot-authored, same-repo PR while build-approved is on
it.
Each approved push cancelled the in-flight build. Approving the 21:43
sync's build cancelled the label-triggered one still queued on strata and
schist-bin. On auto/sync-* branches a new build now waits for the running
one instead, then reuses its artifacts. The approval script no longer
waits for a lone approved build to start before releasing tests, which a
queued build would have turned into a timeout.
Some vendors publish a release feed of their own that is faster and more
precise than anyone's packaging of it. A package opts in with an
.omarchy/upstream.sh hook that reports the newest release as JSON, and the
driver rewrites pkgver, the checksum arrays the hook names, and pkgrel.
Writes are guarded on both ends: every assignment the update will touch is
verified to exist before anything is written, so a hook naming an array the
PKGBUILD lacks fails with the file untouched rather than half rewritten; and
pkgver is held to pacman's character set, because it lands in a file makepkg
sources as shell.
Ordering is vercmp's, not sort -V's -- they disagree about whether 1.0a
precedes 1.0, and pacman is what decides if a published package is an upgrade.
That is also why the workflow runs in an Arch container rather than straight on
the runner.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ryan Hughes