ps2homebrew
[FR] Consider expanding OPL's archive to cover pre-R1697 builds
Checks
- [X] I have checked existing OPL feature requests for duplicates and found none
Describe the FR
Some ongoing issues relate to relatively recent regressions that predate the OPL build archive's oldest builds. As a result, it's difficult to pinpoint which exact builds introduced said regressions.
That might in turn reduce the odds of those issues getting fixed and/or waste developers' time compiling old builds to identify where a regression started. If more archived builds were made available, that kind of "grunt work" could be diverted to issue reporters/testers.
For example:
- https://github.com/ps2homebrew/Open-PS2-Loader/issues/704#issuecomment-1195070208
- https://github.com/ps2homebrew/Open-PS2-Loader/issues/709#issuecomment-1218342289
Describe the solution you'd like
Come up with a means of generating older builds and add them to OPL's build archive.
It probably wouldn't be realistic to go all the way back to R1. But maybe something along the lines of 0.9.3 (805c3362df6c8e5a02de5983d25d7a064359be54) could be a reasonable starting point?
Describe alternatives you've considered
Compiling my own builds... but I'm not currently setup for that. Most testers probably aren't either.
Btw testers compiling their own old builds might be unable to perfectly match "official" builds if they botch old dependency versions or use different OSes/compiler settings than what official pre-made builds would've used.
Additional context
The oldest build in the archive is currently R1633 (7959fea1dc344ae67245d0e18630fdb327652740). But there's a gap of several dozen builds between it and the second-oldest archived build (R1697, 70ed88ab1e59651005b474db65fc538b03a3d23d). Not to mention that R1633 uses a different folder naming scheme (lacks a build number), file structure (ELF-only) and archiving format (ZIP) than everything else.
the archive is filled by the repository CI.
And we can't replicate older builds. we have the code for them, but not the toolchain of each era.
