Installing with just package name does not work if the packages was not released recently (and thus does not contain `package-info.json`)

[fingolfin]

Installing orb
  Input is a package name
  Downloading packages-infos.json from PackageDistro
  Fetching latest release for gap-packages/orb
  Error: Release has no package-info.json asset
  Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

But why is this needed? Clearly it can see where the latest package release is?!

[stertooy]

But why is this needed? Clearly it can see where the latest package release is?!

There's a few things at play here:

1. The PackageDistro may not be up-to-date, i.e. a package has made a release that has not yet been merged into the PackageDistro.
2. A release may not have a package-info.json file as a release asset.

About 1: I interpreted the "latest" version of a package to be "the latest release of that package". So, to avoid accidentally getting an older version, I kind of had to go through the package repository. If we instead interpret "latest" as the "latest version in the package distro", then we can indeed just get the necessary information from the packagedistro and avoid going to the package repo entirely.

An additional downside of the current approach, which I didn't consider before, is that this action will function really badly for packages not hosted on GitHub or with a "non-standard setup", e.g. the homalg_project. Using the packagedistro would avoid that problem.

Of course, we could do both together, by first trying to get info from the package repo, and using the package distro as a fallback if that doesn't work...

About 2: when I was deciding on how to get an archive URL for a particular version (not necessarily latest) of a package, I chose to use package-info.json, mostly for convenience. But it's certainly true that many (old) releases don't have that file. And for packages whose authors don't use the release-pkg workflow, neither will new releases. So that was probably not a very optimal choice 😓.

Some possible ways to avoid using package-info.json:

• Make an educated guess which release asset is the one we want. Will probably work fine 99% of the time, and easy to program... but I just don't like it.
• Download the PackageInfo.g file associated to the tag of the release, and use that file (with GAP) instead. E.g. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gap-packages/orb/refs/tags/v5.1.0/PackageInfo.g