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A faster heart for F-Droid

f-droid.org

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Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#191

Post by worldsavior »

MYEUHD wrote: post #183
worldsavior wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not their responsibility. Why they should care about these kind of stuff? Don't drop everything on governments. A project like F-Droid is dumb to begin with where they're the one to build the apps.

> A project like F-Droid is dumb to begin with where they're the one to build the apps. I heartily disagree. Linux distributions also build the packages themselves, and that adds a layer of trust. It ensures that everything in the fdroid repo is free software, and can be self-built.

They don't. The community builds the packages.

There are other ways to ensure something is free software and can be self built. Their approach is highly inefficient.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#192

Post by jabwd »

well_ackshually wrote: post #186
troyvit wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like ya'll are so eager to crap on a thing that you don't even read tfa. > this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. So you are assuming it's a rando's basement when they never said anything like that. If their way of doing business is so offensive either don't use them, disrupt them or pitch in and help. > I understand this is a volunteer…

> this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. This is effectively a rando's basement. It doesn't matter that they've been a contributor or whatever. Individuals change, relationships sour. Securely hosting how ? By locking the front door ? By being a random tech company in the midwest ? Or by having proper access control ? As a little reminder, F-…

> This is effectively a rando's basement. You. Do. Not. Know. Stop straw-manning stuff its so pointless.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#193

Post by immibis »

0x1ch wrote: post #95
LoganDark wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colo is when you want to bring your own hardware, not when you want physical access to your devices. Many (most?) colo datacenters are still secure sites that you can't visit.

Every colo I've visited has a system for allowing physical access for our equipment, generally during specific operating hours with secure access card.

While this is true, you stated a tautology: of course every colo you visited allows visiting.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#194

Post by jeltz »

lrvick wrote: post #45
Aurornis wrote: post #35

> this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access. I can’t be the only one who read this and had flashbacks to projects that fell apart because one person had the physical server in their basement or a rack at their workplace and it became a sticking point when an argu…

400K would go -fast- if they stuck to a traditional colo setup. Donations like this are rare and it may be all they get for a decade. Personally I would feel better about round robin across multiple maintainer-home-hosted machines.

If 100 years is fast, yes. You can get pretty sweet colo for 4k per year. I know cheaper places too.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#195

Post by jeltz »

quantummagic wrote: post #107
pydry wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame mozilla wont step up to fund it. They've spunked way more money on way dumber things.

Imagine the good they could do if they didn't pay their CEO 6 million a year.

6 million is 30 really good senior software devs in Stockholm, or I think 10 in SF. American CEO salaries are crazy.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#196

Post by goodpoint »

lrvick wrote: post #44
skiing_crawling wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never questioned or thought twice about F-Droid's trustworthiness until I read that. It makes it sound like a very amateurish operation. I had passively assumed something like this would be a Cloud VM + DB + buckets. The "hardware upgrade" they are talking about would have been a couple clicks to change the VM type, a total nothingburger. Now I can only imagine a janky setup in some random (to me) guy's closet. In…

> It makes it sound like a very amateurish operation. Wait until you find out how every major Linux distributions and software that powers the internet is maintained. It is all a wildly under-funded shit show, and yet we do it anyway because letting the corpos run it all is even worse.

This is 100% false.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#197

Post by prmoustache »

Aurornis wrote: post #35

> this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access. I can’t be the only one who read this and had flashbacks to projects that fell apart because one person had the physical server in their basement or a rack at their workplace and it became a sticking point when an argu…

Ultimately hosting is not the most critical part as long as backups are stored in places other members of the projects have access to (and one copy could be in their own home, I don't think the f-droid repos have grown to be that big they can't be hosted on commodity NAS).

What is usually more critical is who has the credentials for the domain management.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#198

Post by prmoustache »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #84
fruitworks wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just host servers in your own basement! You need to pay out the ass to host servers in some big company's basement!

I don't have a problem with an open source project I use (and I do use F-Froid) hosting a server in a basement. I do have a problem with having the entire project hosted on one server in a basement, because it means that the entire project goes down if that basement gets flooded or the house burns down or the power goes out for an extended period of time, etc. Having two servers in two basements not near each other w…

It is not your bank. You don't need 99.999999999999999% availability of the build server of an app store. Especially if the apps packages can still be downloaded from regular https servers.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#199

Post by ndriscoll »

wtallis wrote: post #147
amrit3128 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the _if_ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. You're free to complain about it but Fdroid has been running fine for years and I'd rather have a volunteer manage the servers than some big corporation

They quite notably haven't been running fine for years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44884709 Their recent public embarrassment resulting from having such an outdated build server is likely what triggered them to finally start the process of obtaining a replacement for their 12 year old server (that was apparently already 7 years old when they started using it?).

In what world is it embarrassing to not buy hardware you don't need? The servers worked fine for years. When there was an actual reason to spend money, they bought something new. Sounds like good stewardship of the donations they receive.

I finally just upgraded my 9 year old computer with an i5-6600k to a Ryzen 9 5950x because I wanted to be able to edit home videos. I already rarely even used 1 core on the old CPU, the new one is 7x more powerful, and it's an ebay part from 5 years ago. I don't foresee needing to upgrade again for another decade. I probably would've been good for another 15-20 years if I had upgraded to a DDR5 platform, but RAM prices had already spiked, so I just swapped the motherboard and CPU.

Re: A faster heart for F-Droid

#200

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

utopiah wrote: post #163

I think there are quite some misconceptions about F-Droid in the comments : - you can be your own F-Droid server In fact it's a basic static HTTP(S) server that is generated with the list of .apk and meta-data so it rely doesn't require much. I think what is concerning to people is that the most popular INSTANCE of F-Droid, the one that is by default when one downloads the F-Droid CLIENT, is "centralized" but again t…

"It's only popular, it's not really central to F-Droid itself."

I've used F-Droid for years and I've never used the client ("the F-Droid app")

For me the value of F-Droid is as a list of open-source software with (a) pointers to source code and (b) sample binaries

The goal of F-Droid could be to enable Android users to read, edit and compile the software they choose to run on their "phones"

But F-Droid promotes their own app ("the client") so maybe the project's goal is something more like an "app store"

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