Manual Verification?

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1

I’ve been looking at verifying my app “NewsFlash” for a while. I wanted to avoid the mistake I made with its predecessor “FeedReader” which I gave the id org.gnome.FeedReader. So it has the app-id org.gitlab.newsflash because it was (and still is) hosted on gitlab. Unfortunately the exact group name newsflash was not available anymore so I chose news-flash with the display name being newsflash.
This was long before verification on flathub was a thing or even talked about. But now the horizontal dash is keeping me from verifying.
Website verification is not even an option in the developer settings. I guess that is blacklisted for gitlab.com because its not possible anyway.

Any advice on what I should do?

I could end-of-life the application and re-release it with a new app-id. But this would be a major pain for me and all users.

I noticed that thunderbird has a badge saying it was manually verified. I realize that compared to thunderbird NewsFlash is just a tiny fish in the ocean. But is there a way to request something similar?

Another thought I had about the verification process: what happens if the source code moves? Gitlab.com has been getting much more strict with access to CI time, user limits and so on. What if my app-id was still com.gitlab.XXXX for historical reasons but the project itself had been moved to gitlab.gnome.org?

2

You could end of life rebase https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/maintanance#end-of-life

Still, it might be annoying for you and your users.

You might be able to get manually verified, if you can get barths attention, but we try to not distract him and it’s the least favorite thing to do, as it creates a lot of manual work.

Right now, we’re no reverifying, but that will change. So your app would become unverified, unless you still have access to that repo.

3

Yes, eol rebase is what I was talking about. How would one go about that?

Submit & verify the renamed app first?
Is adding the flathub.json file enough to eol the old app or does there have to be an actual update?

4

Yes, that’s crucial.

Adding/changing the file will trigger a new build and therefore a release. But you don’t have to version bump.