Flatpak Maintainership: the future

[Lunarequest]

I'm currently the maintainer of the whalebird desktop flatpak. I've had a lot of difficulty since the introduction of better-sqlite prebuilts as a dependency to keep the flatpak up to date. A update of the flatpak involves the following steps

1. update my local clone of whalebird-desktop to the latest version.
2. use flatpak-builder-tools to generate a generated-sources.json to fetch all the deps.
3. build, only for it to fail sometimes because the prebuilt requested by better-sqlite has changed
4. update the better-sqlite dependancy
5. test that everything works
6. rebuild again before pring the flathub repo and publishing

with the recent update I can no longer do step 5. I run iceshrimp a fork of misskey with some of the best mastodon compact out there. v5.1.0 removed support for misskey and seems to have ensured any fork of misskey with mastodon api support will be considered misskey and it will refuse to connect.

This is the straw that broke the camels back for me. With work and such I already had very little time to ensure everything works. I feel it would be a disservice to users to publish software I no longer use and can no longer ensure works. Going forward someone needs to be found who is trusted and more involved upstream and can ensure that the flatpak is up to date.

[Lunarequest]

as of writing v5.1.0 has been merged into the repo, going forward this ideally should be the last release I'll work on. I'm willing to continue maintaining it until a suitable replacement maintainer is found

[h3poteto]

By the way, Iceshrimp is a fork of Misskey? or a fork of Firefish?
If it is a fork of Firefish, we can support it.

[Lunarequest]

It is a fork of firefish

[h3poteto]

Which Iceshrimp server are you using? I want to check it.

[Lunarequest]

It is a fork of firefish i'm using a single user instance social.nullrequest.com

[h3poteto]

Can you please try 5.1.1?
https://github.com/h3poteto/whalebird-desktop/releases/tag/v5.1.1

[Lunarequest]

just going through the changes it looks like you've set the default instance for iceshrimp to be https://iceshrimp.social but to be clear they aren't the official instance. The closest to a offical instance is https://estrogen.network but we don't have a official instance and don't plan to any time soon

[h3poteto]

@Lunarequest Hi, I released the new version of Whalebird, 6.0.0. It doesn't contain better-sqlite, so will this make your job easier?

[Lunarequest]

Finally got some free time I'll update the flatpak. Like I said my time is slowly becoming more and more stretched and will be for the next few years. I will maintain this flatpak until someone is found to replace me or my other commitments become lessened(this is unlikely for a few years)