I don’t feel that the concept of a refresh is immediately clear, and the client doesn’t provide any context (unless I’m missing it entirely). Once you get it you get it, but I don’t think users should have to rely on forums for details like that. I think the cleanest answer might be putting a tiny refresh explainer when you expand a refreshed item, or possibly a tooltip. Perhaps showing which field prompted the refresh?
There is no way for discover to know what caused the refresh. Usually it means a dependency bundled in the app was changed, or the app was re-compiled.
I’m not sure if there is a better word to express this, otherwise the only option is to add more text as you proposed.
I also find this confusing. If the software was changed, even in a tiny way, why has the point version not changed? Though yeah, this is not really Discover issue, I think. What distro are you on?
Refresh literally means ‘make fresh again’ or ‘renew’ - and you are looking at Discover, which is simply a way of listing packages from various sources.
So ‘refresh’ would mean to freshly synchronize and update your sources - something you do before searching, installing or updating, in order to make sure that the package list is fresh.
The exact mechanism depends on the settings/setup/distribution, so it’s sad that it’s not made more transparent…
I would say this conversation I had just an hour ago, where some folks complained that we don’t like package managers that hide the workings - many of us prefer using the terminal for exactly this reason, though some (Octopi is one) give you the option to use the GUI but it works by opening a terminal, and pamac actually has a ‘pseudo’ terminal which I don’t like as much, but it still gives the same output.
So maybe vote for Discover to be ‘refreshed’ by giving extra options for a terminal output showing the result of whatever you click or do
Good question! But it needs to be addressed to the one who pushed out an update without bumping the version number. As others have mentioned, Discover can’t know why this happened.
It depends where you are in Discover. So if you click the “Refresh” icon on the Updates screen, then “Refresh” means just what you say.
However, in OP’s original screenshot, “Refresh” is being used with the specific meaning it has in Flatpak world, i.e. a new commit of an application without a change in version number.
In Flatpak, version number is just a kind of label. The concept of “commit” in Flatpak is what corresponds to “version” in most other packaging systems.
(It’s not helpful that even the Flatpak documentation doesn’t use the terminology consistently, e.g. the flatpak-update man page talks about “download the latest version”, when it should say “latest commit” to be consistent with Flatpak terminology.)
