[FEATURE]: Avoid publishing nightly / daily builds as pre-releases

[Zegorax]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Ciao!

Hope you're doing well :)

I'm currently watching the releases of this repository to know about the upcoming updates and release notes.

I noticed that there is currently a lot "pre-releases" being published automatically. Unfortunately, it generates quite some spam and it's difficult to keep track of what is truly new.

I'm therefore opening this discussion to maybe find a better alternative than publishing them as pre-releases ? Github does not allow to watch only releases.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Describe the solution you'd like

N/A

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[vitormattos]

Hi!

Thanks a lot for raising this, your feedback makes total sense, and sorry for the noise caused by the current setup.

We are experimenting with an automated nightly build workflow. Our first approach was to publish a new pre-release on every merge to main, but as you correctly pointed out, this quickly becomes spammy for people watching releases.

At the moment, the GitHub Action deletes the previous nightly release and creates a new one mainly to keep the download link “fresh”. We need a stable URL because the Nextcloud App Store requires a direct link to the build artifact, and using a GitHub release was the simplest solution so far.

A better approach might be to keep a single fixed nightly pre-release and only update its assets on each merge, instead of creating a new release every time. This would preserve the required stable link while significantly reducing release notifications. And, changing the previous message, this is the actual state.

Would this approach solve the spam issue you’re experiencing? If you have other suggestions, we’d be very happy to consider them.

Thanks again for taking the time to report this, feedback like this really helps us improve both the project and its release process.

[Zegorax]

Thanks a lot for your answer!

I think that keeping a single one that gets updated is good alternative, as it will not send any notification.

Would it be possible to do that then ?

[vitormattos]

@Zegorax I’ve merged a PR that switches nightly builds to a single fixed pre-release instead of creating a new one each time.

I also realized that the Nextcloud App Store only allows one nightly per app, so I adjusted the Action to publish the nightly only for the latest stable version.

Could you check if this improves the release feed spam?

[Zegorax]

Ciao @vitormattos , I've added again the notification subscription to the releases. I will give you a feedback in the next 2-3 days :)

Thanks a lot for the quick answer and implementation!