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New F-Droid repository format for faster and smaller updates

f-droid.org

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Re: New F-Droid repository format for faster and smaller updates

#81

Post by distances »

glenstein wrote: post #57
geokon wrote: post #8

I didn't realize the app was still being worked on. It's been years since the UI update and it's always been amazingly buggy (across 3 different phone). I'm always impressed by how broken it is - especially if you have a slow connection. Downloads will randomly go into a weird frozen state where they can't be stopped. The download status will change when you change tabs/sections. Sometimes download will go past 100%…

>I almost exclusively use FDroid, it's an amazing project. But I've never seen an app with so many issues I've used Fdroid for years, downloaded and updated apps hundreds of times across multiple devices and never encountered a single thing you described. Death, taxes, and people confidently generalizing from one-off cases of highly unusual experiences. >I didn't realize the app was still being worked on. By my count…

I guess you have enough answers, but I agree with the others. It's a very, very buggy app. It does the important task that it promises so we all love it despite its flaws. But if this was a commercial app, the rating would probably sit somewhere between 1 and 3 stars.

Re: New F-Droid repository format for faster and smaller updates

#82

Post by RussianCow »

glenstein wrote: post #67
bunabhucan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't update itself from 15.6 to this new release on my phone. It keeps re downloading the files.

Just worked for me without issue on the first try. On both my phone and my tablet.

"Works on my machine" is not really a helpful response to someone sharing an issue they have. Are you implying that the parent is lying? If not, what constructive purpose does this comment have?

(I write this as someone who has experienced nearly every bug mentioned in this thread.)

Re: New F-Droid repository format for faster and smaller updates

#83

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

The apps I get from F-Droid are generally not ones that will be frequently updated. In the case that there are updated versions available, I prefer to look at the source code changes before making a decision to update. (That, to me, is the benefit of F-Droid: Android apps with source code available.) As such, I do not use the F-Droid client app. I prefer to download the apks from the F-Droid site myself.

Re: New F-Droid repository format for faster and smaller updates

#84

Post by onli »

glenstein wrote: post #64
lucideer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Death, taxes, and people confidently generalizing from one-off cases of highly unusual experiences. I've used F-Droid for years and my experience matches the gp. I've read many reviews saying similar. Friends to whom I've recommended it have told me similar in person. It seems yours is the highly unusual experience here.

Sure, and I have friends who use it who don't report these issues, and my subjective assessment of reviews is that this isn't the predominant experience being reported, despite your protestations to the contrary. The 'data' here is miscellaneous anecdotes from an internet comment section. But let's just observe the claim that F-droid supposedly isn't being updated. You can see that F-droid is being updated if you...…

F-droid updates haven't changed the ui or noticeable fixed ui bugs in years. There was one revamp, right? But it feels like nothing came after that.

I'm sure they work on it in the background and the upgrades do something, but parents experience is still normal and correct.

Re: New F-Droid repository format for faster and smaller updates

#85

Post by ptx »

pserwylo wrote: post #17

Congratulations team. I was involved in the project for quite some time years ago. Indeed I ported the original “Read the full index.xml into Java memory using a giant DB class” with the first “Stream entries from XML into the database, and make use of ContentProviders” because they seemed like the “Android way to do things” at the time. I also worked on the migration from XML to JSON metadata. At the time this was d…

What is (or was) the benefit of using ContentProviders compared to accessing the database directly? They seem useful for exchanging data between apps, but I can't figure out what their role is when they're internal to the app (not exported).

Is it just that they're required for using CursorLoader, so that you can easily load things in the background without having to create a custom Loader implementation? And they're basically just a fairly inconvenient database abstraction?

Re: New F-Droid repository format for faster and smaller updates

#86

Post by bheadmaster »

I'm really glad this is fixed.

I like to make a point of keeping my software up-to-date, but waiting for F-Droid to download/uncompress/analyze the repository index has annoyed me so much I've stopped doing it whatsoever, unless I make a conscious decision to actually do it and invest time time.

Re: New F-Droid repository format for faster and smaller updates

#87

Post by bheadmaster »

franky47 wrote: post #68

> stronger digest algorithm for repository signing: We now use SHA256 instead of SHA1 for the index signature Neither SHA-1 nor SHA-256 are signing constructs, they are hash functions. They provide integrity, not authenticity. For this kind of thing (a central authority signing and public clients verifying), you'd need a public key signature scheme, like ECDSA or EdDSA.

The usual process of signing a bunch of data is to hash it and then encrypt it with public key encryption, so the hash function is as important as the public key encryption scheme.

If the hash is weak, an attacker may be able to construct compromised data that hashes to the same hash, and the whole signature becomes worthless.

Re: New F-Droid repository format for faster and smaller updates

#88

Post by ptx »

gnramires wrote: post #74
jeroenhd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not strictly necessary, but if the entire repo can fit inside 8MiB of compressed data I can understand why they chose this rather than server-side search. That's "three clicks on Twitter" in terms of data, not exactly the end of the world, though less is always better. F-Droid's main servers are always overloaded anyway, so just sending a nice and cacheable compressed archive seems like a fine trade-off to me.

It would be nice to use some kind of delta compression to only download latest changes. There could be a version-stamp on your local data, the client would send the timestamp to the server, and it would send a delta from your version to current version of db (easy to cache). Integrity checks would be important I think.

That's essentially what they're announcing, isn't it?

Re: New F-Droid repository format for faster and smaller updates

#89

Post by never_inline »

WeylandYutani wrote: post #38
david_allison wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for everything that you've done! The Android ecosystem is uniquely hostile, and it's hard for an outsider to understand the public and private battles that you've inevitably faced over the years.

Less hostile than iOS? How does F-droid work over there?

I think GP meant development complexity.

Re: New F-Droid repository format for faster and smaller updates

#90

Post by never_inline »

rakoo wrote: post #70
RicoElectrico wrote: post #22

It shouldn't need to download the whole repo index for a mobile app store. It's a flawed assumption to begin with.

I don't won't to be tethered 24/7 to the internet to use my mobile phone. Data exchange isn't free, both in money and in environmental impact. That's a flawed assumption to begin with.

On the other hand having to download all app details at once takes many MBs, not always fast. You can instead cache details of some applications.

I think homebrew moved away from repository approach too.

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