Please mark this as an unofficial package and display maintainers

[eht16]

I don't know who is maintaining this Flathub package, I couldn't find any note on https://flathub.org/apps/org.geany.Geany.

Even worse, the only reference visible is "by Geany Team" which suggests these builds are provided by the Geany developer team.

Could you please add some information to the Flathub package page to provide information who is responsible for this package?

Thank you.

[AtomicRobotMan0101]

Seconded.

@eht16 raus-ed me today and I'm a bit pissed that this package LOOKS DAMNED OFFICIAL.

Fan submissions are 100% excellent, but this is blatant passing-off. On the Flatpak and searches within it (via terminal) one cannot distinguish legit packages as the checkmark is missing there.

Change the "By" tag on Flatpak please.

[barthalion]

The website clearly marks unverified applications as such, so do recent KDE Discover and GNOME software releases.

If you're using CLI, you can switch to the verified subset as described in the documentation: https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-users/installation#subsets

[eht16]

@barthalion the root issue isn't resolved I think.

To me, it is confusing that the above mentioned Flatpak site looks like the Genay Flatpak package is maintained by the Geany developers. This is because of the "by Geany Team" term below the title and in the blog "Community built" there is a link to the project website directly.

But at no point there is any reference to who really maintains this package and that bug reports related to the Flatpak packaging should be reported there and not to the Geany project itself.

I think it would help all parties, if this could be made more clear that project developers and package maintainers are not the same people.

Thank you.

[TiZ-HugLife]

Hi there. Sorry it took me a while to get around to responding to this.

So, there is definitely a developer / packager disjoint in regards to the package's presentation, and I agree that it is a problem. This software is indeed by the Geany team. But the person maintaining the package here is mainly just me, and I'm not an upstream developer at all. It seems like you want me to be the person listed on Flathub's page, but then that's inaccurate too. I don't do any upstream work on Geany at all, so now there's a new piece of unintentional deception, and the actual Geany developers would be right to say, "who's this TiZ hack and why is he taking all the credit for our software?!" It would be just the same for if you looked it up in your software manager and the person who maintains the native package was somehow presented as the person responsible for making the overarching software. So I agree that all the information inherent in this particular type of disjoint should be available somehow.

I'm not here to trick people; I'm just here to make a good piece of software available in Flathub the best way that it can function with the inherent limitations in place. And that's still not even the full story. Someone else packaged it before they left it to languish and then I took it over. There are certain families of distro that benefit from having packages available in this manner, as well as certain philosophies to software management that benefit as well. To be specific, you can install Geany this way in locations that will persist across distro migrations and distro reinstalls.

@eht16, you seem to be a member of the Geany team, and compared to elextr, your opinions on Flatpak are much stronger. I'll just ask you outright: Do you even want this package to exist? I have strong fundamental disagreements with people who simply hate Flatpak as a format universally, but that doesn't quite seem to be the case for you, and even if it was, I don't really want to package software as an act of spite! I don't want to subvert upstream desires. (EDITED to add stuff.)

I'm going to reopen this issue until we come to a solution that everyone finds satisfactory.

[eht16]

@TiZ-HugLife I do appreciate your work on packaging Geany as Flatpak. At no point I wanted to say you or other Flatpak maintainers want to trick users or do any sort of bad behavior.

The main point of this issue is for me that it is not clear on the Flatpak page to users that this is a package created and maintained by a third party and not the developers of the software itself. The disjoint of software developers and packagers is totally fine IMO and very common. It just should be more visible on the Flatpak pages, so users have the chance to learn the difference. Also, as it is common for distributions, bug reports should be either directed to the package maintainers or at least there should be some help for users to learn where to report bugs (package related bugs to the package maintainer, everything else to the developers).

Do you even want this package to exist?

I don't want to judge the Geany FlatPak package should exist or not. In general I think might be some need for FlatPak packages. Specifically for Geany, I'm not sure if there are much benefits. By design, a text editor needs access to various places on the host system, to open and edit files, to use compilers, linters and other tools and probably more. So what is the advantage of isolating Geany into its own environment and have to break the isolation at the same time.

I don't "hate" ("hate" is a very strong word especially when using in contexts of software) Flatpak in general. Though I think there are some disadvantages not all users might be aware of. Most distributions doing a great job in keeping their packages up to date, especially in terms of security issues and users get notified by their system and only have to install the recommended package updates. At least the bigger distributions have some sort of quality assurance and/or review process to ensure a constant level of quality. I don't know enough about Flatpak and FlatHub if there is some equivalent. Also, regarding security updates of a software itself or some package in the dependency chain, users of FlatPak packages are highly dependent on the package maintainers of each FlatPak package which uses the affected package as a dependency. To be honest, I don't know how this is handled in the FlatPak world but at least for bigger distributions this works pretty good as there are usually multiple maintainers for packages and in case of security updates only the affected package needs to be updated and not all depending packages as well.

You see, I'm rather old fashioned in this regard and prefer the "traditional" distribution package system. But this is just my personal opinion and I do not and I cannot decide a FlatPak package should exist or not. But I can choose not to use it for me personally.

What I wish is that it is as clear to users that this is a third party created packages as it is when they install Geany from the Debian package repositories or from Fedora or from ArchLinux, etc.

[TiZ-HugLife]

Okay. So... I'm probably going to bounce out of all of this pretty soon. The ecosystem has been developing in a way that has killed all of my passion for it, and having any sort of maintenance responsibility has become sort of soul-crushing. But before I do that, and this package effectively becomes unmaintained; what specifically do you want this package to look like? You've only asked that you want it to be clear that it's a third-party created package, which means that you want changes to Flathub itself whose discussion simply isn't going anywhere. So let's focus on what I can do right now.

• I can add a README that describes that this package is unofficial, community-maintained, and has absolutely no involvement from the actual Geany team whatsoever.
• I can also add a line to the start of the appdata.xml file's description, which is what software center applications and the Flathub website read from, that describes that this package is unofficial and community-maintained.
• I will not change the developer_name in the appdata to describe me or anyone else. The second item above is already likely against Flathub's best practices, but if I change the byline, it will be false advertising. People don't come to Flathub's website or their software centers expecting to see the name of whoever is maintaining the package as the byline for who is providing/creating the software. That will only cause confusion.

Do you want one, both, or neither?