[Replicant] Interested in contributing to Replicant

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Wed, 10 Aug 2016 13:16:46 -0400
Aditya Bharadwaj <aditya_bharadwaj at 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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