How to distribute specific versions of our game?

1

Hi,

I am involved with the freeorion project. In our free time we develop/maintain freeorion, an old-school 4x space opera game (FOSS) - just think of people who liked Masters of Orion once building a game they love.

We already publish our stable versions as org.freeorion.FreeOrion on flathub. We publish a new major version about every one or two years.

Besides the stable versions we also maintain usually well-playable weekly releases (distributed as: source code, windows, ubuntu, snap) and more importantly there are the so called “slow games” (can take a few months) using certain branches. The slow games are currently distributed as source code, windows binaries, ubuntu repo, and snap repo.

I would like to invite more people to the slow games by providing a flatpak.

The slow game code is relevant for a few months and a small user base. Rarely we need to update the slow game code for a running game in order to fix a bad bug.

Would it be possible/appropiate to build/publish on flathub with a “tag” e.g. org.freeorion.Freeorion/slow-game-025 ?

Would the flathub-nightly repository be better suited?

We are not in the position to self-host a repository. Are there better options?

2

Tooling wise from the flathub side of things there are only stable and beta repos. So you can choose between them, my gut feeling is, you don’t want the slow game on beta.

Then the only option would be to add the game to flathub once more, but with a different appid (and changed metadata accordingly)