Bart Piotrowski
aggressively intermediate
I was pulling the numbers out of my ass the other day, saying that 80% of this slop is not going to stay maintained in a year, but I wasn't that far off!
Of the 120 unique repos, 32 were maintained and 88 were abandoned. No seriously, a big portion of them was completely deleted, nowhere to be found, others stopped 6 months ago, right after submitting to Flathub.
GitLab could have won by not doing anything at all but they would rather be renaming issues to work items, adding a dumb split view for the issue tracker, and working on other misfeatures no one asked for, anything but fixing 5+ years old bugs and half-assed functionality. And this doesn’t even touch the layoffs and “AI first” pivot.
Spent more time thinking about moving Flathub out of GitHub and I probably arrived at something doable.
For CI, we just keep using GitHub Actions until we come up with something better lol. Actual pipelines are executed in flathub-infra/vorarbeiter either way, it could just stay there. We would need to extend vorarbeiter to accept webhooks from other forges and submit commit status elsewhere but that's largely it. We could eventually ask Buildkite nicely and replatform again.
flatpak-external-data-checker would need to learn how to open pull requests elsewhere. Similar thing applies to other scripts we're using here and there.
The rest is annoying legwork of figuring out how do we shift >3k repositories and collaborators elsewhere without losing maintainers. Maybe we just don't? New apps go to the new place, old apps get mirrored to the new place, maintainers can opt in to migration. :dragnthonk:
I can't be there at Linux App Summit this year to talk about it in person, so as a consolation prize, here's the first blog post on Flathub's infrastructure, specifically CDN et al.: https://barthalion.blog/flathub-internals-cdn/
Why are Flathub downloads so slow sometimes? It's probably not your fault.
No one (literally no one) is actually shitting any money into Flatpak but it's a fun read.
Like clockwork, the moment I leave for vacation, Flathub explodes twice. This would have been funny if it weren’t the third February in a row.
land of the free, picture unrelated
GitHub not displaying files content which have unaddressed comments in the diff view, and then also collapsing review threads in the main PR view with "X hidden conversations" box is truly something. It's almost as if we made up using it for reviewing code.
