Ok, I'll explain my reasoning.

1. in them you can run pretty much anything, mostly they are used to run automated tests, create and publish docs, etc...
2. that's fine, I am quite experienced in maintaining them, it's my daily job.
3. I know
4. I intend to keep them in sync when the main (this) repo tests pass. For example latest master tests failing commit c3212b20e78e7a882bae5c61df84a0b2e731ab75 #272

Unfortunately, there is no way for me to automatically hook into your release process since you don't create them on github, so I check once a week if you release Exiftool or not. Then I sync my fork (https://github.com/woss/fork-exiftool/actions) that runs the tests and when they pass I release a new version in exiftool-actions

this all would be much simpler if this repo would use actions and a github release together with your manual one.

Let me know if you have any more questions :)

When you say "if this repo would use actions", can you be more specific about how this is done?

By actions in this context, I mean Github actions. In my fork, you can see that I have already configured rudimentary actions that always run. For example, in the case of the exiftool main repo, the scenario would be that if there is a PR the actions are run, tests, code listing, and anything you need to deliver quality code. I can help you do that.

I have a long-standing issue about doing a github release (#13), but I haven't had time to figure out how to do this remotely from the command line. Do you know a command to do this?

Since Exiftool doesn't need to be installed a zip file called asset is enough, this is also covered by my exiftool-action. Essentially the flow is following:

1. PR is created, worked on and actions run, tests pass and you are happy with it.
2. you merge it to the master. Tests run again to make sure nothing is broken.
3. with the github CLI you can do the following gh release create and then manually increase the number and submit the release
4. the tag is created ( this is the version, let's say 12.93 ). Now the release contains the assets that are zip files of the directory. This is how basic release works.

More advanced release can have the action that runs on the release, or that the action creates the release when you create the tag from main, in which case release assets contain the gzip file and the checksum.

I hope I have explained it well enough. As I said, I can help you with this if you wish.

p.s. in order to help you it would be good to see your current release script :)

D

What's missing? It would help me if you could explain to me how you see this flow happen.

Btw, exiftool-actions already has the releases for the exiftool for each version I published. Although it doesn't contain as much as your gzip file people can still download older exiftool release.