howoldis
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madjar
"Last updated" column is a bit too vauge
The current nixos-unstable channel was bumped roughly 4 days ago. When you visit http://howoldis.herokuapp.com/ it says "1 day ago". When you click on the channel you end up at https://releases.nixos.org/nixos/unstable/nixos-19.03pre151837.ca2ba44cab4 which tells you that it was indeed 4 days ago.
I would expect to see "more then 1 day ago", ">3 days ago" or "~4 days ago" or similar messages there.
My haskell knowledge is very basic and a brief look at the code didn't really reveal why this was happening.
You didn't happen to take a screenshot of https://nixos.org/channels/ at the time? howoldis simply parses out the "Last Modified" column of the page to get the time of the last update and I've seen that timestamp update without the channel actually advancing. Not that familiar with how exactly the contents of the folders on the channels page are managed but presumably a simple re-upload of the same artifacts, changing the last modified timestamp, would result in what howoldis would consider a channel update (if that makes sense).
I do not have the screenshot but I remember that it was fairly recent and in line with that the website (howolidis.…) reports while the actual content was as described above.
IIRC the folder might be created more often then the actual channel is bumped. Especially if an older evaluation on hydra finishes (again, due to restarted builds) it might cause that.
On the channel bump side there are the following references for that issue: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-channel-scripts/issues/14 & https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-channel-scripts/pull/22
The idea behind channels is that they only go forward in time. There were some bugs in the logic as explained in the links above, but howoldis will assume bugless channel updating.
I'm closing this for now as it seems those bugs were fixed, please reopen if you see they still happen.
Note that more precise timing would be to show how long has passed since last commit and last successful channel update as per https://github.com/madjar/howoldis/issues/16
Just for reference this seems to be happening right now for 18.09, howoldis reports the channel as 1 day old whereas in fact it hasn't updated in almost a week.
I think the git CommitDate is closest value to what I'd like to see (which is "push date"). Note that this is distinct from AuthorDate, i.e. the default date shown in logs and GitHub UI.
Which brings us back into 2016: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-channel-scripts/issues/10
Diffing the latest CommitDate's between what's in NixOS/nixpkgs and NixOS/nixpkgs-channels repos is what I implemented in #39 (but it's kind of big / invasive change..).