Flathub JSON recipes

[Alexander Larsson]

On Fri, 2017-08-04 at 15:11 +0100, Robert McQueen wrote:

> The commenter on my blog was also concerned about the split of repos
> and
> potentially of access permissions in this scenario, recreating some
> of
> the regular Linux distro structure of packagers and developers being
> distinct groups of people. Flatpak is aiming to disintermediate here
> -
> does Flathub need to do better at this too?
> 
> Should/could we also support (and indeed, encourage) a mode where
> Flathub can follow a stable branch on a upstream repo, and instead
> obtain the .json from there?

I understand what this comes from, but when we tried to implement this
in gnome it did not turn out to be great in practice. Basically,
keeping a flatpak manifest in master that builds the latest thing from
git works very well. However, the stable build is much more
problematic. First of all, where does it go? The natural place would be
on the stable branch, but that is often (at least for gnome) based on
the actual version nr (e.g. gnome-3-22), so the branch to use to find
the manifest to build kept changing as things were released. And
secondly, the release version of the manifest is quite different than
the "build everything from git" version for master. Just writing up the
docs on how to handle this got very confusing, and I don't think anyone
managed to do it right.

So, I think having it in two places with different workflows is
actually not that bad. And additionally it lets us get certain
guarantees about what we build and from where which are nice as a
redistributor.

For the record, here is the current recommended practice for the gnome
apps setup:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps/Building


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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl at redhat.com            alexander.larsson at gmail.com 
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