warp-engine-client/RELEASE_NOTES.md

WarpEngine Store 1.4.0

A store no longer needs a repository of its own. Until now every store in the registry pointed at a repository holding its config.json, and the client read that file to know what to install. It turns out almost nothing in there was necessary: the store engine's built-in defaults already cover the host-to-asset mapping, the install modes, the platforms and the behaviour. What defaults cannot know is identity — a slug, a name and a catalog URL — and that is exactly what a registry record carries.

So storeRepositoryUrl is now optional. A record with a name and a catalog URL is a complete store: the client derives the slug from the catalog host (teletypegames.org → teletypegames), writes a small config and installs. Given a repository it still reads it, and that file remains the authority on how the store behaves — which platforms it offers, which statuses it shows, where things land. A repository without a config.json is treated as no repository at all.

With the defaults, games land in a folder named after the store id and released, archived and demo titles are listed: a catalog that publishes a demo means it to be played.

The site's registry endpoint changed to match — storeRepositoryUrl answers null when there is none — and adding a store is now genuinely one database row with two fields filled in.

The "Install all" button is gone. Titles are installed one at a time from their own cards.

No footer. The window carried a bar at the bottom at all times — a toggle and a line of absolute paths — for something most sessions never need. The log is still there, with the two folder buttons in it, but it lives behind a quiet switch at the bottom of the side menu and takes no room until it is opened. The grid gets the height back.

The repository is now warp-engine-client. The app has always been called WarpEngine Store; warp-engine-desktop-gui described the role rather than the product, and the host-specific engines keep their own shape (warp-engine-desktop-store, -retroarch-store, -batocera-store). Gitea keeps a redirect from the old path, and the releases and tags moved with the repository, so existing links and clones still resolve.

Three things a screenshot found

Photographing the setup screen — which no automated count had ever looked at — turned up three faults that every check had passed:

• the store badge in the bar rendered as an empty pill when no store was open;
• the gate's store picker showed as an empty dropdown stub, because an explicit display in the stylesheet beats the browser's own [hidden] rule;
• the gate went up while the "No installable titles in the catalog" line stayed on screen underneath it.

The last one was a design fault, not a typo: whether the gate is up was an imperative call on a view rather than state, so the gate and the grid could disagree. The setup screen is now a field in the state store, and that one field decides which of the two is drawn. The window test's gate assertion was wrong too — it demanded a store picker, which only appears when the registry offers more than one store, so a perfectly good window failed it.

Linux and Windows packages now come from CI

A vX.Y.Z tag now starts the pipeline, which builds the AppImage, the deb, the NSIS installer and the portable exe — Windows through Wine — creates this release and attaches all four. macOS stays a local build, because Apple's toolchain and its signing exist only on a Mac, so make release from a Mac pushes that package onto the same release afterwards. Publishing uses a gitea_token repository secret in Woodpecker.

The Windows installer is not signed: Windows will warn about an unknown publisher until there is a certificate.

Opening it on macOS

Ad-hoc signed, not notarised, so macOS asks first:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/WarpEngine Store.app"

What is attached

The macOS arm64 package, built and verified here, plus whatever the pipeline attaches for Linux (AppImage, deb) and Windows (installer, portable).

Verified

A repository-less store was installed end to end against a local registry serving one record with storeRepositoryUrl: null: the id came out as teletypegames, the engine and the shared core downloaded, the written config had three sections, engine 1.1.0 accepted it, it listed the same ten titles the configured store does, and a hosted title synced into a sandbox with its menu entry written. make check is clean, and the setup gate was photographed on a machine with no store at all.