> Putting up all sorts of requirements on where and how to build is not helpful [...]
Well that's the general trajectory of what I'm thinking about - NOT hurdles, but infrastructure AND incentives for developers, that will help their products grow, OSS or not. What if Flathub helped you publish native Linux builds on Steam?
> Most upstream developers will likely have their own infrastructure.
Bingo. Right now to cover the three major platforms on self-hosted infra, you need to at least 1. buy a Mac, which no longer has an x86-64 CPU, so no dual/triple booting and the VM story isn't exactly here yet, 2. therefore also buy a PC, which you probably want to dual-boot if you're cost-conscious, which means you will probably have either only one native Windows OR Linux builder online at a time, OR make it a VM host which will require more hardware resources and perhaps limit its portability (so you're more likely to buy a more expensive Macbook and make that your portable workstation, rather than a cheaper Mac mini), or 3. buy an extra PC to host the "other" builder.
It's 100% reasonable to go for a hosted CI solution; I'm not saying "let's copy whatever Apple does", but they do offer Xcode Cloud, so that developers can benefit from vertical integration. All platforms benefit from integration, whether it's more horizontal, vertical, or both boils down to strategy, and I think it would be beneficial to explore more angles.
Sure, as long as it's optional. I wasn't necessarily referring to self hosting your own infrastructure but simply to the notion that for most applications out there, building them is kind of a solved problem already and flatpak likely isn't the center of their universe but more like one of several things they need to support.
Offering some build infrastructure is nice but sounds like it would just end up competing with what is out there already. Unless you have a particularly novel/good take on that, you are basically just putting a lot of effort into cloning stuff that you can already get elsewhere for reasonable fee. Making the use of that mandatory vs. use your own and upload the binary is what the article is about. I think not supporting uploads is not really going to be a thing based on the discussion here.
I can't judge the wisdom of adding some optional build infrastructure. Maybe this all just boils down to some people needing an excuse to start doing this because they are interested in building such a thing. I'm not against that of course. Go for it. But it sounds like it would involve quite a bit of cost and infrastructure that isn't necessarily core to what flathub is about.
Well that's the general trajectory of what I'm thinking about - NOT hurdles, but infrastructure AND incentives for developers, that will help their products grow, OSS or not. What if Flathub helped you publish native Linux builds on Steam?
> Most upstream developers will likely have their own infrastructure.
Bingo. Right now to cover the three major platforms on self-hosted infra, you need to at least 1. buy a Mac, which no longer has an x86-64 CPU, so no dual/triple booting and the VM story isn't exactly here yet, 2. therefore also buy a PC, which you probably want to dual-boot if you're cost-conscious, which means you will probably have either only one native Windows OR Linux builder online at a time, OR make it a VM host which will require more hardware resources and perhaps limit its portability (so you're more likely to buy a more expensive Macbook and make that your portable workstation, rather than a cheaper Mac mini), or 3. buy an extra PC to host the "other" builder.
It's 100% reasonable to go for a hosted CI solution; I'm not saying "let's copy whatever Apple does", but they do offer Xcode Cloud, so that developers can benefit from vertical integration. All platforms benefit from integration, whether it's more horizontal, vertical, or both boils down to strategy, and I think it would be beneficial to explore more angles.