Stable / Beta branches

[NabilaWorks]

We were just able to switch to the Flock master channel with fvm and everything worked great!

This includes all the tests and the release scripts which were using fvm and fastlane.

We were able to publish a new TestFlight release built with Flock and it got approved on App Store Connect without issues.

However, our external testers are reporting some loss in scrolling smoothness, specifically on an older iPhone Mini.

It doesn't seem to be related to Flock as we did another TestFlight release with the original Flutter master channel and we were able to reproduce the same loss in scrolling smoothness.

In our experience, the Flutter team has frequent performance regressions on their master channel, which is why we have been forced to stay on the stable channel thus far.

We have a few questions :

1. Is Flock going to mirror the stable and beta branches as well?
2. Since there are going to be notable fixes and improvements in Flock which will be lacking from Flutter, will there be something like stable-cp (cherry-picks) branch on Flock which will provide all the benefits of the stable branch from Flutter + the most impactful fixes from Flock ?
3. Is there a protocol for reporting issues while using Flock ?

• In this particular example with the loss of scrolling smoothness, since the issue is reproducible on the Flutter master channel, should we file it in the Flutter repo or here?

Thank you and great work so far!

[matthew-carroll]

Hi. Thanks for trying Flock. It's great that you were able to take it end-to-end. As you alluded to, Flock right now is literally a copy of Flutter master, so that's expected.

We absolutely want to mirror beta and stable, along with each release tag.

We haven't decided exactly what mechanism we want to use to integrate our own changes. We'll want to find the option that looks like it will create the least amount of maintenance work as Flutter continues to change under Flock.

Is there a protocol for reporting issues while using Flock ?

Not yet, but feel free to file issues like this for anything that comes up. We'll assemble some issue templates at some point.

In this particular example with the loss of scrolling smoothness, since the issue is reproducible on the Flutter master channel, should we file it in the Flutter repo or here?

Yes, definitely. Probably everything that isn't related to FVM or branch selection will be a Flutter bug at this point. So those issues should all be logged against Flutter.

[NabilaWorks]

We just filed flutter/flutter#157827 after painstakingly recompiling a ton of different master commits until we identified the culprit.

The amount of bandwidth and time invested is insane.

And of course, it seems to us, that it is caused by an engine issue.

As a reference, we would label this as a p0 as it affects iOS scrolling which is one of the most essential mobile interactions, but lets see how it turns out.

[crovax124]

on the same boat. Using some packages that doesnt support the Master channel of flutter yet and need to build on stable. Would really want to tryout flock. The current "stable" branch here to bad gives a version of 0.0.0-unknown

[matthew-carroll]

Hi, I wanted to drop this Discussion link here in case either of you have input: #20