Boxxy Terminal Request

Project information:

Name: Boxxy
Homepage: GitHub - miifrommera/boxxy: A Terminal for GNOME · GitHub
License: Proprietary
Upstream has been contacted: I’m the developer

Hello, I want to ask for possible ways to publish in Flathub a proprietary app. Basically the app will get open source, but till then;

That’s my build YML

app-id: play.mii.Boxxy
runtime: org.gnome.Platform
runtime-version: "master"
sdk: org.gnome.Sdk
sdk-extensions:
    - org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable
command: boxxy-terminal

finish-args:
    - --allow=devel
    - --device=dri
    - --filesystem=host
    - --share=ipc
    - --share=network
    - --socket=fallback-x11
    - --socket=wayland
    - --socket=session-bus
    - --socket=pulseaudio
    - --talk-name=org.freedesktop.Flatpak

cleanup:
    - /etc
    - /include
    - /lib/pkgconfig
    - /share/doc
    - /share/gir-1.0
    - /share/gtk-doc
    - /share/man
    - /share/pkgconfig
    - "*.la"
    - "*.a"

build-options:
    append-path: /usr/lib/sdk/rust-stable/bin
    env:
        CARGO_HOME: /run/build/boxxy-terminal/cargo

modules:
    - name: boxxy-terminal
      buildsystem: simple
      build-commands:
          - cargo --offline fetch --manifest-path Cargo.toml
          - cargo --offline build --release --manifest-path Cargo.toml
          - install -Dm755 target/release/boxxy-terminal -t /app/bin/
          - install -Dm755 target/release/boxxy-agent -t /app/libexec/
          - install -Dm644 resources/icons/play.mii.Boxxy.png
            /app/share/icons/hicolor/256x256/apps/play.mii.Boxxy.png
          - install -Dm644 flatpak/play.mii.Boxxy.desktop
            /app/share/applications/play.mii.Boxxy.desktop
          - install -Dm644 flatpak/play.mii.Boxxy.metainfo.xml
            /app/share/metainfo/play.mii.Boxxy.metainfo.xml
      sources:
          - type: dir
            path: ..
          - cargo-sources.json

The app runs a `boxxy-agent` outside the Flatpak sandbox, similar to Ptyxis, and basically has full access to the system. I already have setup a Flathub repo https://miifrommera.github.io/boxxy-flatpak-remote/repo so I was wondering if I could somehow publish directly from it, and how? Another way is a .zip from Github releases

Suggestions?

Direct uploads are technical possible. However, its only granted manually on a case-by-case basis to well-known and trusted projects, such as Firefox or OBS.
For your application it’s not an solution.

You mentioned you want to open-source your app at some point. What is preventing it now? Would it be possible to make it open-source with the Flathub release?
It certainly would be the most ideal path.

That aside, if you want to release it to Flathub while its still proprietary, a pre-build binary archive is a possible avenue.

The reason i don’t want to open source it yet, is because I use lots of LLM, so very often it puts garbage (eg test files, a bad code block i missed etc) on Git, which i don’t care right now, because I do often re-writes; but if I publish the code i should triple check and that will slow down the development; So I want to do that when all the functionality will be there, and I have manually reviewed everything; And the reason I want to publish already in Flatpak is because I’d like to have more testing;

Anyway, I’ll try to open a PR in Flathub with a binary then,thanks for response!

In that case, I will have to ask you to postpone the submission until you are ready to open-source your application.

There are two requirements that are of particular note to this, the Generative AI policy and the Stable releases requirement.

To put it shortly:
While generative AI is not outright unpermitted, there are a lot of AI slop that is attempted to be put on Flathub. This makes us reviewer more skeptical of submissions involving AI. And essentially hiding the code because of this is not a good first impression.
Also, Flathub is meant for stable software, not something that will change often because of it being in an early development stage.

So, your code should be in a good, human-verified state before the submission.

It’s not really trying to hide the code, but it’s really more practical not to publish the code of a project, till some certain point; that’s irrelevant to LLMs; however, i understand your reasoning, and tbh i’m skeptic too if i should release a proprietary Agentic Terminal anyway, even as a “Preview”

Anyway, I’m good with the answer, thanks!

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