deltachat/docs/f-droid.md

F-Droid - Overview

• https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.b44t.messenger/ is the Delta Chat page on F-Droid.org, the F-Droid app will show similar information.

• https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/tree/main/metadata contains the description, icon, screenshots and all meta data shown for Delta Chat on F-Droid in the fastlane format.

• https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/metadata/com.b44t.messenger.yml contains additional F-Droid-specific metadata and build instructions that do not fit the fastlane format. F-Droid adds new versions automatically to the end of .yml file.

• New versions are recognized by tags in the form v1.2.3 - before adding tags like that, have a look at https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/blob/main/RELEASE.md#release-on-f-droid. The build and distribution is expected to take up to 7 days.

F-Droid Build status

• https://monitor.f-droid.org/builds shows F-Droid's overall build status, if Delta Chat shows up at "Need updating" or "Running", things are working as expected. :)

• https://f-droid.org/repo/com.b44t.messenger_VERSIONCODE.apk
  (with VERSIONCODE = 537 or so) links to successfully built apk even if it is not yet in the index (which may take some more time). F-Droid keeps the last 3 successful builds in the main repo, while the rest will be moved to the Archive repo: https://f-droid.org/archive/com.b44t.messenger_VERSIONCODE.apk

Use F-Droid-tools locally

$ git clone https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata
$ git clone https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver
$ cd fdroiddata

Now, metadata/com.b44t.messenger.yml can be modified. For testing, one can change the repo to a branch by adding the line Update Check Mode:RepoManifest/BRANCH to the file.

Set some path to ndk etc:
$ cp ../fdroidserver/examples/config.py . # adapt file as needed

Checkout repo as F-Droid would do:
$ ../fdroidserver/fdroid checkupdates -v com.b44t.messenger
(for testing with uncommitted changes, add --allow-dirty)

Build repo as F-Droid would do:
$ ../froidserver/fdroid build -v com.b44t.messenger:

(via https://f-droid.org/docs/Installing_the_Server_and_Repo_Tools/ and https://f-droid.org/docs/Building_Applications/ - might require pip install pyasn1 pyasn1_modules pyaml requests)

Changing the description

• Change the files metadata/en-US/short_description.txt and metadata/en-US/full_description.txt in https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/ repository.

• Make sure there is a "newline" at the end of the description (see https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/merge_requests/3580).

Changing F-Droid metadata

• The file com.b44t.messenger.yml can be changed via a PR to the https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/ repository.

• Reformat the metadata using
  $ ../fdroidserver/fdroid rewritemeta com.b44t.messenger # called from fdroiddata dir