Improving Software List

[Linux in a Bit]

I just watched Inkbox's video about the X16 (https://youtu.be/bFIk8WV-RYQ), and the suggestion about the software discovery situation made me remember something.

There's this GameBoy Homebrew site called Homebrew Hub that could greatly improve all of the current issues with the frankly bad software list: https://hh.gbdev.io/
It's 100% open source (hosted using two repos: https://github.com/gbdev/virens and https://github.com/gbdev/database) licensed under GPLv3 and can be completely hosted as a static site with something like Github Pages or Codeberg Pages.

I will work on setting this up for this project if this is something people actually want, and if somebody that organizes the site tells me that if I do get it working it will actually be used (I don't want to waste effort on something that won't be used).
Thanks!

Comparison:

[TomXP411]

This is very much a community project, meaning members of the community are encouraged to develop solutions and community web sites.

Yes, our upload page is one way to distribute software, but it's not the only way - and there are certainly ways to improve it. While I don't want to lose out on having a simple, one-stop-shop for downloads, we also want to encourage people to come up with useful and attractive solutions for software discovery.

Tell me more about how you would implement this and how you'd tie this in to the repository here; would this be something people have to visit separately to list their software, or do you have a way to auto-discover new uploads and make the available on your listing?

[Linux in a Bit]

Mmm... turns out I completely missed the 3rd repo for the api https://github.com/gbdev/homebrewhub
Looks like this might just be a bad solution.

I'm going to look for something else that's usable or possibly build something from scratch.

[Linux in a Bit]

Here is the currently very bare-bones initial thing I threw together:
https://b2server.codeberg.page/Program-Library/@main/

And the repo:
https://codeberg.org/B2server/Program-Library

Don't expect much, I'm still very much working on basic functionality and I readily admit it looks pretty trashy right now.

[Linux in a Bit]

As for an updated reply to TomXP411's questions:

Tell me more about how you would implement this and how you'd tie this in to the repository here; would this be something people have to visit separately to list their software, or do you have a way to auto-discover new uploads and make the available on your listing?

This would be a separate site dedicated to sharing and downloading software. Programs would be added via some kind of simplified pull request process. I'm still looking into how that would be handled, but I think down the line I'm going to want to move the code to Github and find some kind of API to achieve this.

This would have to be the only official way to share software, keeping the forum as a sort of support page and supplementary way to share additional things (linked on each game's download page of course). Meaning that once everything is (probably manually) copied over, the average person should never have to touch the forum or anything else to share or download programs.

[TomXP411]

So this is kind of a chicken-and-egg thing. No one is going to commit to a new files site until a functional prototype is demonstrated... but that means you'd have to develop a prototype with no guarantee it would be used.

What I suggested in the past is a much simpler approach: we already have storage, hosting, and communication. All we need is a nice place to present the uploaded files.

Maybe the best approach is to build a pretty php based front end for the file section; it can read the database and show the uploaded files, along with allowing people to do things like leave reviews and ratings.

Also, ideally, it would be self-contained (aside from the phpBB dependency) and not rely on things like Node or extensive php frameworks.

In other words - using the data we already have and presenting a nice, useful page like you pointed to (https://hh.gbdev.io/) is a great idea. It just seems like the best solution is to generate a page like that from our database, rather than trying to replace what we already have.

[Linux in a Bit]

That could work

I'll look into that. It would be pretty similar to, and somewhat compatible with, what I have already made (sans tag support and quite a few other things I wanted to add).

My main problem is that I just don't know php, but I can learn it...

I think I'll continue development of my json(-ish) site for now, then make it work with the current php database.

What is db hostname? Also, wouldn't it require authentication of some sort?
I don't want to have to set up a web scraper for the forum as at that point it would be easier to start a new database from scratch.