I've created a manifest for a flatpak package

[Ludvig]

On 10/5/2022 at 7:11 PM, jonri said:

@Ludvig nice to see you're getting this ready for Flathub!  Since I just went through this with DarkRadiant, I took a look at your manifest to see if there's anything that will trip up the process:

• Comments are fine, but they don't like commented out lines so you'll want to clean those up before submitting.
• They require a 64x64 and a 128x128 icon file, and the one you're providing is 48x48.  You might need to go hunting in the assets or on the wiki, or see if someone here has a suitable icon lying around.
• I'm not sure about having --socket=wayland and --socket=x11 together.  If we don't have explicit wayland support then --socket=x11 should be sufficient on its own; if we do, then I think you use --socket=wayland with --socket=x11-fallback.
• You have --talk-name=org.freedesktop.Notifications but I don't remember anything in TDM or the installer that would make use of it.  If there is, feel free to correct me
• You'll need a flathub.json file that tells their build system which CPU architectures to support or skip.  Without this, I think it will try to make an ARM package too.

Once you've got an appstream file I'll gladly check it over for you too.

 

Thank you for the feedback!

Yeah I should clean out commented lines. The manifest was just based on a template I've used for other projects, so I haven't gotten around to that, same with the --talk and --socket permissions. The icon thing is correct, I just used the one from the project but I need to find a bigger one (or just upscale this one, as a last resort maybe). As for the flathub.json I just copied the one from DarkRadiant. Hope you don't mind!

Regarding DarkRadiant, changing the install location for this is probably a good idea, because of the restrictions you described in the other thread, the question is what to use. Ideally flatpaks shouldn't have more permissions than what they need (so preferably no --filesystem=host or --filesystem=home if not absolutely necessary). The XDG specification also doesn't seem to have a default directory for games, but one work-around would be to use the actual XDG_DATA_DIR (usually defaults to /home/$USER/.local/share), which would fit with how other applications store their data. This would make the game folder kind of hard to navigate to from DarkRadiant though, maybe? Would it be possible to set the default search-path for DarkRadiant to something like ~/.local/share/darkmod? In that case DarkRadiant would just need --filesystem=xdg-data/darkmod for its permission.

I've modified the manifest with your suggestions and the proposed change in default location. If you want to give it a try, I suggest deleting ~/.var/app/com.thedarkmod.TheDarkMod first so there are no conflicts with the old game installation.

Edit: I used https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/155775322931431372/F03A45CA10D985E847A7D694AA3A91D6F829F77E/?imw=637&imh=358&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=true as a basis and created a new 128x128 icon for the app. Would this be acceptable, you think?

com.thedarkmod.TheDarkMod.yml

Edited October 7, 2022 by Ludvig
Added image

[jonri]

13 hours ago, Ludvig said:

Would it be possible to set the default search-path for DarkRadiant to something like ~/.local/share/darkmod? In that case DarkRadiant would just need --filesystem=xdg-data/darkmod for its permission.

I like this approach, it seems like it would be easy to have some logic in DR that if the game path isn't set and that directory exists, then set it by default.  This would keep it from affecting anyone that isn't using the flatpak version, and for anyone who just installs both flatpaks things will already be set up with the right paths.

Locking down the filesystem for DR may be a minor inconvenience to anyone who keeps multiple TDM installs around (dev builds, etc), but in this case Flatseal provides an easy, one time solution to open up full access (I've already documented the reverse in the wiki).

Your 128px icon looks fine to me, seems to be from the same original source as the 48px icon.  Does it look ok if you derive a 64px icon from it too?

 

[Ludvig]

On 10/8/2022 at 5:02 AM, jonri said:

I like this approach, it seems like it would be easy to have some logic in DR that if the game path isn't set and that directory exists, then set it by default.  This would keep it from affecting anyone that isn't using the flatpak version, and for anyone who just installs both flatpaks things will already be set up with the right paths.

Locking down the filesystem for DR may be a minor inconvenience to anyone who keeps multiple TDM installs around (dev builds, etc), but in this case Flatseal provides an easy, one time solution to open up full access (I've already documented the reverse in the wiki).

Your 128px icon looks fine to me, seems to be from the same original source as the 48px icon.  Does it look ok if you derive a 64px icon from it too?

 

Yeah, the permission then should be --filesystem=xdg-data/darkmod:create for the manifest for DR too, so either the darkmod installer or DR can create the dir. The launcher script I made already checks if the folder exists, and if not it creates it, so it'll handle the folder already existing.

And yeah I think it's reasonable to lock down access by default, and the people with advanced use-cases should be able to find information on how to customize their install. However, I don't think it's possible to customize the install path for the flatpak, since the launcher script currently assumes it's installed in the default location. So currently, if they want to install multiple versions, they'll need to use another installation method. Fixing this would be difficult as it is now, I think, because we'd need to get the install path from the installer somehow, and we'd have to include a lot more logic checks in the launcher script I think. The idea then would be that the launcher script would check the default game directory for a log, and extract the actual install path. But I don't think that's currently feasible.

Of course, having one flatpak installation of DM and another non-flatpak installaton will work just fine!

I made a quick 64x64 icon by scaling down the 128 icon with linear scaling in gimp. Looks a little blurry to me.

[jonri]

On 10/10/2022 at 1:07 PM, Ludvig said:

I made a quick 64x64 icon by scaling down the 128 icon with linear scaling in gimp. Looks a little blurry to me.

I took a stab at it, here's what I did in case you want to try to improve it some more. In Gimp I used scaling with NoHalo interpolation, and then I adjusted the contrast to +30.

[Ludvig]

On 10/15/2022 at 4:50 AM, jonri said:

I took a stab at it, here's what I did in case you want to try to improve it some more. In Gimp I used scaling with NoHalo interpolation, and then I adjusted the contrast to +30.

That looks really good, thanks!