Re: WebApps functionality

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 12:28 pm, Jeremiah C. Foster via epiphany-list 
<epiphany-list gnome org> wrote:
> Using the distro package is smart, but it pushes users back to the
> command line because GNOME Software doesn't have support for Epiphany
> web apps. This means there are no icons viewable via GNOME Software,
> the app doesn't show up at all and you cannot manage it. It makes
> Epiphany web apps limited to something that is created on one user's
> machine and not really useful as something you distribute.

Well no, the GNOME Software support is different. That support was for 
"installing" a predetermined set of web apps managed by GNOME Software 
by creating desktop files in your home directory 
~./local/share/applications. The apps were hardcoded: Facebook, 
Dropbox, etc. Turns out, that is never what users want to get when 
installing a Facebook or Dropbox app, everybody hated it, the apps all 
had one-star review feedback, and removing the feature was absolutely 
the right thing to do.

You can still distribute Epiphany web apps and install them in GNOME 
Software, just create a package that contains a desktop file, like this:

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/fedora-developer-portal/blob/f31/f/fedora-developer-portal.desktop

As far as I know, fedora-developer-portal was the only software to 
install a system web app like this. Just package a desktop file and 
some appstream metadata, and it should work. fedora-developer-portal 
switched to Chromium in Fedora 32 so that I could remove the separate 
Epiphany web app runtime package from Fedora, now that GNOME Software 
no longer needs this. I've been considering removing this functionality 
from Epiphany now that nothing is using it that I know of, but if you 
plan to distribute web app packages in Purism, then I could keep it 
around. It's not really hurting anything, but it was broken for a long 
time until recently due to lack of users and lack of testing, and 
there's no point in keeping functionality that nobody is using.

Michael