Inclusion of android port to F-Droid

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Black
Posts: 4
Joined: 25 Feb 2018, 17:52

Inclusion of android port to F-Droid

Post by Black »

Hello, I'd like to propose the inclusion of the android port of OpenMW (https://github.com/OpenMW/android-port) to F-Droid. F-Droid is a free and open source software repository, where every app is built from source and signed by F-Droid. With Xyzz changes merged back into upstream, it became pretty functional and playable.

There are no problems from the technical side (No proprietary libs, etc), but the inclusion policy additionally requires approval from the project authors. Since OpenMW is a big project with many maintainers, I'd like to open this to discussion.

Additional information about F-Droid (and inclusion policy) can be found here https://f-droid.org/en/docs/
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psi29a
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Re: Inclusion of android port to F-Droid

Post by psi29a »

If you are willing to be the maintainer of OpenMW/OpeneMW-Android for F-Droid, I'm OK with it but I'll defer to Zini for any final say.

Be prepared to help field many questions, feature requests and bug reports however. :)
Black
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Joined: 25 Feb 2018, 17:52

Re: Inclusion of android port to F-Droid

Post by Black »

From my side I can only maintain metadata in F-Droid repository, to ensure that new versions of the app are building correctly. Of course, it's not likely there will be any other versions in near future except for the current one, as there's no active developer working on it right now, however, it still worth including, considering that some people run their phones completely off-google and the only reliable source of software for them is F-Droid, it would be nice to have something like OpenMW in the repository (and we have many other interesting projects like supertuxcart, minetest and others).

If users will have any suggestions, questions, etc, and they are not related to F-Droid specific things (for example missing updates or failing build), they are usually pointed to the upstream page (however, in this case it's simply worth mentioning that this app is not actively developed).

There is no need to create a separate repo or maintain it somewhere else, F-Droid buildserver fetches the source code from it's repo for each build. F-Droid doesn't make copies of repositories and doesn't serve anything locally (other than binaries themselves and sourcecode tarballs which they correspond to).
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psi29a
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Re: Inclusion of android port to F-Droid

Post by psi29a »

At this moment, the OpenMW-Android repo, does not have an official OpenMW champion behind it. I wish that wasn't the case but no one has stepped up except for sandstranger who left the forums here for fear of legal retribution (of which there are none) and Xyzz which hasn't been active lately.

So while I'm always enthusiastic about OpenMW going places... I just want to inject a dose of reality concerning the project. So while OpenMW keeps moving onward, the Android bits aren't currently being developed. So if there is an issue... OpenMW doesn't have anyone that can help with Android specific questions.
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jvoisin
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Re: Inclusion of android port to F-Droid

Post by jvoisin »

I don't think that making available to the masses a software that won't likely be maintained/updated/fixed is a great idea :/
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Zini
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Re: Inclusion of android port to F-Droid

Post by Zini »

Fine with me.
xyzz
Posts: 156
Joined: 14 Jan 2018, 22:25

Re: Inclusion of android port to F-Droid

Post by xyzz »

In its current state the port won't get accepted to f-droid because I'm using "android" branch of my repo for openmw clone, the issue is that the repo can be updated at any time so there's no build reproducibility. Every other dependency is fixed to a specific version though, and cryptographically verified :). So the maintainers need to decide whether they want to stick with a specific openmw release. Oh, another issue is that the build takes forever and eats tons of RAM, so to build Android releases (with LTO and arm/aarch64/x86/x86-64 support) I temporarily rent a c5.18xlarge (72 cores, 144 GB ram) from ec2.
terabyte25
Posts: 55
Joined: 26 Jul 2018, 12:58

Re: Inclusion of android port to F-Droid

Post by terabyte25 »

xyzz wrote: 24 Dec 2018, 02:26 another issue is that the build takes forever and eats tons of RAM, so to build Android releases (with LTO and arm/aarch64/x86/x86-64 support) I temporarily rent a c5.18xlarge (72 cores, 144 GB ram) from ec2.
Jesus.
Black
Posts: 4
Joined: 25 Feb 2018, 17:52

Re: Inclusion of android port to F-Droid

Post by Black »

xyzz wrote: 24 Dec 2018, 02:26 In its current state the port won't get accepted to f-droid because I'm using "android" branch of my repo for openmw clone, the issue is that the repo can be updated at any time so there's no build reproducibility. Every other dependency is fixed to a specific version though, and cryptographically verified :). So the maintainers need to decide whether they want to stick with a specific openmw release. Oh, another issue is that the build takes forever and eats tons of RAM, so to build Android releases (with LTO and arm/aarch64/x86/x86-64 support) I temporarily rent a c5.18xlarge (72 cores, 144 GB ram) from ec2.
Well, right now the metadata would only build one release, since there is not much activity. For main repo, the metadata points to a specific commit (the one where you removed the leftover binaries), auto-update mode is disabled, so if there will be more releases I'll manually write according metadata with patches to ensure it builds. As for your openmw repo - I can also apply a patch from metadata to clone a specific commit instead (if there would be a need for future versions). For build times - it builds just fine, takes around 30 minutes on my home computer (ryzen 1500x, 16 gb of ram).
Dyskos
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Re: Inclusion of android port to F-Droid

Post by Dyskos »

From my point of view, the reason the android port of OpenMW isn't consistently maintained, is partially because its existence isn't known very well. Part of getting traction is having easy accessibility. I'd used OpenMW for 2 years before even knowing there was an Android port -- and this was while following the forum every day. Even after learning of the Android port, it's still a bit of hassle to get and get working. I have F-droid, and being able to just download it and get it working would be a magical situation. Not to mention, its greater visibility could potentially draw in developers that would have liked an android port but were unaware of its existence.
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