search

flathub / com.github.birros.WebArchives

https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.birros.WebArchives
1 stars 0 forks source link

collaboration on extension point? #2

Open ramcq opened 4 years ago

ramcq commented 4 years ago

Hi Birros - firstly I wanted to congratulate and thank you for your work on WebArchives - I was very surprised and pleased to find it on Flathub! It's a very approachable and aesthetic implementation of a Zim viewer application.

I work for the Endless OS Foundation - we use various technologies in Endless OS (www.endlessos.com) such as our own SDK, zim files, Kolibri, etc to deliver content as apps, so that people can still browse, search and learn even if they don't have reliable or affordable internet access.

We've recently become a non-profit foundation so we're trying to retire some of our own internal infrastructure and code, and join with existing offline internet communities. We're switching our Encyclopedia apps and other Wiki-style content to re-use Zim files from the Kiwix project, so we've integrated libzim-glib into our SDK so that it can load and render this content as standalone apps.

We're considering making a standard Flatpak extension point for storing Zim files in, so that any app we have that uses the SDK to presents some Zim content would name a Flatpak extension (eg org.kiwix.Content.wikipedia_en or something) that it would rely on, and it would contain the zim file(s), downloading/updating it as necessary. Some of our apps might rely on the same content file (eg Animals presents a subset of Wikipedia articles with a different UI/design) and some might use multiple zim content files so we have an n:m relationship of apps to content, which is why the extensions mechanism is appealing.

We were wondering if WebArchives Flatpak would consider also sharing this convention and supporting this extension point - we could set up a subdirectory extension so that you would have a location (eg /app/share/content/wikipedia_en...) that contained every extension, and we could have WebArchives look in this location for .zim files, making it easy to load and discover the zim content on the system. (Similarly we could make a flatpak of kiwix-serve which could have a simple UI to enable exporting your available content over the network.)

Thanks! Rob

birros commented 4 years ago

Hello and thank you. I've followed the evolution of the endlessos from the beginning and I share the same values.

I totally agree with the idea you're exposing, I'm personally working on a solution to synchronize and update external content such as zim archives on all my devices, so I'm interested in this kind of initiative.

The use of flatpak extensions is a great idea that I hadn't thought of and that will allow a nice interoperability between applications, so of course, if this solution exists, I will implement it in WebArchives.

If this kind of extension were released, it would allow many possible uses, for example the ability to display information about a location from GNOME Maps, if one day an offline version of Maps is released, or about a band or artist in GNOME Music.

So, yes, I'm ok 👍