Contributing

Reporting issues

If you find an issue in the F-Droid Privileged Extension, you can use our Issue Tracker. Make sure it hasn't been reported yet by searching issues first.

Remember to include the following information:

  • Android version
  • Device model
  • F-Droid version
  • Steps to reproduce the issue
  • Method used to install (e.g. root, update.zip flash, or came with ROM)
  • Logcat - see instructions

Translating

The strings are translated using Weblate. Follow these instructions if you would like to contribute.

Please do not send merge requests or patches modifying the translations. Use Weblate instead - it applies a series of fixes and suggestions, and it keeps track of modifications and fuzzy translations. Applying translations manually skips all of the fixes and checks, and overrides the fuzzy state of strings.

Note that you cannot change the English strings on Weblate. If you have any suggestions on how to improve them, open a merge request like you would if you were making code changes. This way the changes can be reviewed before the source strings on Weblate are changed.

Code Style

We follow the Android Java style. Some key points:

  • Four space indentation
  • UTF-8 source files
  • Exactly one top-level class per file
  • No wildcard imports
  • One statement per line
  • K&R spacings with braces and parentheses
  • Commented fallthroughs
  • Braces are always used after if, for, and while

We enforce some of these, but not all, via checkstyle.

Debugging

To get all the logcat messages by F-Droid, you can run:

adb logcat | grep `adb shell ps | grep org.fdroid.fdroid | cut -c10-15`

Building tips

  • Use gradle with --daemon if you are going to build F-Droid multiple times.
  • If you get a message like Could not find com.android.support:support-..., make sure that you have the latest Android support maven repository.
  • When building as part of AOSP with Android.mk, make sure you have a recent version of Gradle installed as gradlew will not be used.

Running the test suite

In order to run the F-Droid test suite, you will need to have either a real device connected via adb, or an emulator running. Then, execute the following from the command line:

./gradlew check

Note that the CI already runs the tests on an emulator, so you don't necessarily have to do this yourself if you open a merge request as the tests will be run using CI.

Versioning

Each stable version follows the X.Y pattern. Hotfix releases - i.e. when a stable has an important bug that needs immediate fixing - will follow the X.Y.Z pattern.

Before each stable release, a number of alpha releases will be released. They will follow the pattern X.Y-alphaN, where N is the current alpha number. These will usually include changes and new features that have not been tested enough for a stable release, so use at your own risk. Testers and reporters are very welcome.

The version codes use a number of digits per each of these keys: XXXYYYZNN. So for example, 1.3.1 would be 1003150 and 0.95-alpha13 would be 95013 (leading zeros are omitted).

Note that we use a trailing 50 for actual stable releases, so alphas are limited to -alpha49.

This is an example of a release process for 0.95:

  • We are currently at stable 0.94
  • 0.95-alpha1 is released
  • 0.95-alpha2 is released
  • 0.95-alpha3 is released
  • stable-v0.95 is branched and frozen
  • 0.95 is released
  • A bug is reported on the stable release and fixed
  • 0.95.1 is released with only that fix

As soon as a stable is tagged, master will move on to -alpha0 on the next version. This is a temporary measure - until -alpha1 is released - so that moving from stable to master doesn't require a downgrade. -alpha0 versions will not be tagged nor released.