Flatpak Maintainership: the future

[Lunarequest]

I'm currently the maintainer of the whalebird desktop flatpak. I've had a lot of difficulty since the introduction of better-sqlite prebuilts as a dependency to keep the flatpak up to date. A update of the flatpak involves the following steps

1. update my local clone of whalebird-desktop to the latest version.
2. use flatpak-builder-tools to generate a generated-sources.json to fetch all the deps.
3. build, only for it to fail sometimes because the prebuilt requested by better-sqlite has changed
4. update the better-sqlite dependancy
5. test that everything works
6. rebuild again before pring the flathub repo and publishing

with the recent update I can no longer do step 5. I run iceshrimp a fork of misskey with some of the best mastodon compact out there. v5.1.0 removed support for misskey and seems to have ensured any fork of misskey with mastodon api support will be considered misskey and it will refuse to connect.

This is the straw that broke the camels back for me. With work and such I already had very little time to ensure everything works. I feel it would be a disservice to users to publish software I no longer use and can no longer ensure works. Going forward someone needs to be found who is trusted and more involved upstream and can ensure that the flatpak is up to date.