Bisecting regressions in application builds

In case the newest builds of an application introduce regressions, you can use flatpak-bisect to discover which commit introduced the regression. It works just like git bisect.

In case your distribution doesn't install the flatpak-bisect utility, you can find it distributed alongside the Flatpak source code, in https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/blob/main/scripts/flatpak-bisect

First you update the application and get its history:

flatpak-bisect org.gnome.gedit start

Then, you should set the current commit as the first bad commit:

flatpak-bisect org.gnome.gedit bad

Now you need to find the hash of the first known good commit. For that, you can see the build history by running:

flatpak-bisect org.gnome.gedit log

To start bisecting, checkout the first known good commit you find:

flatpak-bisect org.gnome.gedit checkout 5cd2b0648618c9038fbc6830733817309ade29541cdd8383830bbb76f6accf0d

After setting the bad commit and the first known good commit, you can launch the application to verify if the current commit in the bisecting session is a good or a bad one.

To mark a commit as good or bad, run:

flatpak-bisect org.gnome.gedit good

Or:

flatpak-bisect org.gnome.gedit bad

flatpak-bisect will inform you when the first bad commit is found.