Hello Mosu,
I work on a mpv frontend called mpv.net and have it available in the MS Store. The packaging isn’t automated, and the store submission is also not automated. I saw that you have the packaging automated, and wonder if you have the store submission automated as well? I’m not sure if I should continue using the MS Store.
Hey stax76, great to see you here.
My build process is semi-automated, the submission process is completely manual. What do I mean by that?
As you may or may not know, I build on Linux & cross-compile for Windows using the MXE project. This works fine insofar as I can build the applications, sign them, build the portable archive & the NSIS-based installer (there’s a Linux version for NSIS that creates Windows installers). This step is fully automated.
However, the tools around building the MSIX packages are Windows-only tools, and I haven’t found a way to run them on Linux (nor have I found Linux equivalents of those tools). Therefore I run those manually on Windows after the Linux-based builds are done. All steps are contained in shell scripts, meaning I don’t have to do a lot, just start the scripts and wait for it to finish. As this is just a single call to a single script I haven’t looked into automating it yet (meaning I would have to trigger the execution from my Linux build machine; which is possible, of course, just… not worth the effort to me).
The last part, submitting to the store, is completely manual as I said. It isn’t much work either: trigger an update to the application, remove the existing installers, add the new installers built earlier, submit. The number of manual steps is so small that I didn’t really care about investing more time into automating it fully.
I’m happy to be here, thank you for the detailed explanation.
About your build process, I didn’t know much about it, I’ve built mpv a few times with MXE.
I use the Visual Studio UI to build the MSIX package, it would be helpful if I had this fully automated.
My memory isn’t very good, when I do a stable release 2-4 times a year I easily forget the necessary steps, or worry about missing something.
Next time I do a MS Store release, I’ll take and save some notes and check how much time and effort it needs.
Doing a GitHub release is so much easier, GitHub has a great CLI client for it.
I’ve also a passion for music btw. and have playlists on YouTube.
For the internationalization of mpv.net I recently looked at your repo, learned about transifex and use it now too for mpv.net.