On Wed, 10 Aug 2016 13:16:46 -0400 Aditya Bharadwaj <aditya_bharad...@msn.com> wrote:
> Hey Denis, Hi, I'm really sorry for being late to respond. > In response to your blog post regarding Replicant 6.0 early work, I'd > like to contribute to Android Application based areas as I'm an > Android Developer. Thanks a lot! > Please point me to how I can get started, I've already made an > account on redmine with user name: aditya Building f-droid client: ------------------------ The first thing to do would be to compile the f-droid client. Its source code is at https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient.git According to their README, they expect users to build it this way: ./gradlew assembleRelease Not being familiar with Android applications development[1], I don't know if that's the only step required, or what it would do behind the scenes. More specifically I don't know if you are required to have an SDK installed and which ones are supposed to work[2]. Specifications and source code: ------------------------------- The FSDG guidelines[3] requires Replicant not to promote non-free software. Practically speaking we ship f-droid which has in its repositories software that do. A good example is the Firefox application which, in its add-on manager, has non-free software. Practically speaking the apks from the official f-droid repository are built from package definition that comes from fdroiddata[4]. In the case of applications such as Firefox, the package definition contains some anti-feature tag: > AntiFeatures:NonFreeAdd,Tracking,UpstreamNonFree Suggested fix: -------------- F-droid already has: - a way to get such data since it will warn the user about such anti-features by displaying them in red in the f-droid client. - a way to filter out applications: in f-droid settings we have a section called "APPLICATION COMPATIBILITY", where the user can ask f-droid to allow installing incompatible versions or not. However, here, such applications are still displayed. The idea is to: - make F-droid detect Replicant - Add a way to totally hide applications. - Make f-droid hide all applications with anti-features, if running on Replicant. Hiding all the applications with an anti-feature is sufficient, even if ideally we could only hide the anti-features conflicting with the FSDG[3] guidelines. Having a more fine grained filter could be implemented later, as right now meeting the FSDG again is Replicant's top priority. Fix rationale: -------------- The goal is to have a long term solution that require the least possible additional maintenance from Replicant community or developers. Once the fix is in f-droid, if a non-FSDG compliant application shows up in f-droid when using Replicant, all Replicant community or developers would have to do would be to send a patch to add an anti-feature tag to fdroiddata. This would be really straightforward and fast. Contacts: --------- The f-droid bugreport[5] is a good place to ask f-droid specific question on the fix implementation. The Replicant mailing list is also a good place to discuss it. References: ----------- [1]I only wrote one tiny useless Android application with Replicant 4.2 SDK. That SDK uses Apache ant instead of gradle. [2]The last release of Replicant is the 4.2 version, however Wolfgang is working on porting Replicant to Android 6.0, and knows more about more recent Replicant SDK. [3]https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html [4]https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata.git [5]https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/issues/564 Thanks again for your interest. Denis.
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