Open Source

Soon to be modern

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This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 04 Jul 2024, Week 27

F-Droid core

Reproducible builds are a new focus for F-Droid, we’re talking about 2 years new, versus all of our 14. And while it’s a harder path to take, about 9% of our hosted apps are signed by the upstream developers, we are sure it’s the best one forward and we insist on checking this on every new inclusion. That being said, we wish the hardest thing a developer needs to do when this status has been reached is to keep safe their keys but it’s not that easy, the list is long.

In the past week we’ve seen more apps failing to verify reproducibly not because our build and the developer’s one were different but because the signed packages have some “garbage added”. We’ve narrowed it to a specific setup: apps signed by apksigner from build-tools >= 35.0.0-rc1, based on developers that build on Github Actions CI using their latest Ubuntu image. For now we’ve asked developers to try and sign with apksigner from the older 34.0.0 version.

We’re tracking this issue in #3299 and in apksigcopier issue 105.

And some good news, F-Droid Client UI has been stuck in Material-land-circa-2016 for a while now. Even back then the newly modern design split the community in two. But time passed, user got accustomed, Material Design language evolved, and voices started to raise again and ask for a modernization.

F-Droid contributor @proletarius101 has been hacking away at bringing the Client into 2024 with the minimal changes needed, and it looks pretty fine so far. What’s missing to get it done? There’s a question of “shared aesthetic vocabulary before actualizing the colors 😎”, basically we’re in the “bike-shedding” stage, and we hope it won’t take long. You can see the new design at work and read the proposals so far in the actual merge request, and we’re open to your feedback via our usual contact channels.

Community News

We’re off to a new round of “seasonal cleaning”, the first casualty is Wikipedia, Official feature-rich viewer of the free online encyclopedia, which was downgraded to r/2.7.50324-?//r-2020-06-29. Many others will fall in the next week as we are perusing the output of a fresh F-Droid SUSS scan, armed with updated signatures based on the work of our past long time contributor @IzzyDroid.

Don’t be sad if you see your favorite app downgraded in the next TWIF, it’s all for a good cause, to get them all more free than before. Stay tuned for more info!

Not mentioned last week, but Standard Notes, An end-to-end encrypted note-taking app for digitalists and professionals, also got the “cleaning” treatment, old versions got purged, yet thanks to @linsui’s work the app is back and we didn’t miss a beat.

K-9 Mail was updated to beta 6.904, so if you’re living the dangerous live do update as many reported crashes in previous builds.

PiliPala was updated to 1.0.24 but its code is still based on older 1.0.22, as after this version the app developers did not release new versions as open-source.

Newly Added Apps

13 apps were newly added
  • APM – Third-party Bilibili music player
  • Amber – Nostr event signer for Android
  • BlastOff – Casual endless runner featuring vector graphics
  • blichess – Play lichess games over Bluetooth
  • Colemak Mod-DH Keyboard – Colemak Mod-DH layout for physical keyboards connected via USB
  • FocusMastodon – A bright and colourful Mastodon client
  • FocusPodcast – A quality podcast management and playback application
  • GPTMobile – Your all in one chat assistant – Chat with multiple LLMs at once!
  • Keysh – Volume buttons handler
  • MMRL – The ultimate manager for Magisk, KernelSU, and APatch
  • NFC Quick Settings – View NFC status, and quickly access NFC settings, from the Quick Settings menu
  • Parti – Help with partitioning into fractional parts (compute lcm)
  • ServerBox – A server status & toolbox app using Flutter

Updated Apps

122 more apps were updated

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David Rosenthal on the X Windowsing System’s 40th birthday

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David Rosenthal, one of the primary contributors to the X Windowing System, has published an awesome blog post about the recent 40 year anniversary of X, full of details about the early days of X development, as well as the limitations they had to deal with, the choices they had to make, and the environment in which they were constrained. Once at Sun I realized that it was more important for the company that the Unix world standardized on a single window system than that the standard be Sun’s NeWS system. At C-MU I had already looked into X as an alternative to the Andrew window system, so I knew it was the obvious alternative to NeWS. Although most of my time was spent developing NeWS, I rapidly ported X version 10 to the Sun/1, likely the second port to non-DEC hardware. It worked, but I had to kludge several areas that depended on DEC-specific hardware. The worst was the completely DEC-specific keyboard support. Because it was clear that a major redesign of X was needed to make it portable and in particular to make it work well on Sun hardware, Gosling and I worked with the teams at DEC SRC and WRL on the design of X version 11. Gosling provided significant input on the imaging model, and I designed the keyboard support. As the implementation evolved I maintained the Sun port and did a lot of testing and bug fixing. All of which led to my trip to Boston to pull all-nighters at MIT finalizing the release. ↫ David Rosenthal They were clearly right. During those days, the UNIX world was using a variety of windowing systems, all tied to various companies and platforms. Standardising virtually the entire UNIX world on X aided in keeping UNIX compatible-ish even in the then-new graphical era, and X’s enduring existence to this very day is evidence of the fact they made a lot of right choices early on. Rosenthal also explains why one of the main alternatives to X, Sun’s PostScript-based NeWS, which was also co-developed by Rosenthal, didn’t win out over X. It had several things working against its adoptions and popularisation, such as Sun requiring a license fee for the source code, its heftier system requirements, and the fact it was more difficult to program for. After trying to create what Rosenthal describes as a “ghastly kludge” by combining NeWS and X into Xnews, Sun eventually killed it altogether. Of course, this wouldn’t be restrospective of X without mentioning Wayland. We and Jobs were wrong about the imaging model, for at least two reasons. First, early on pixels were in short supply and applications needed to make the best use of the few they were assigned. They didn’t want to delegate control to the PostScript interpreter. Second, later on came GPUs with 3D imaging models. The idea of a one-size-fits-all model became obsolete. The reason that Wayland should replace X11 is that it is agnostic to the application’s choice of imaging model. ↫ David Rosenthal This is about as close to a blessing from the original X Windowing System developers you’re ever going to get, but Rosenthal does correctly note that XWayland is a thing, and since not every application is going to be rewritten to support Wayland, X will most likely be around for a long time to come. In fact, he looks towards the future, and predicts that we’ll definitely be celebrating 50 years of X, and that yes, people will still be using it by then.

Hiling sa SC ng ilang agri groups: Itigil ang pagbaba ng taripa para sa imported na bigas | 24 Oras

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Video by via Dailymotion Source Hinihiling ng ilang grupo sa Korte Suprema ang pagpapatigil sa pagbaba ng taripa sa ilang imported items kabilang ang bigas. Babala ng agriculture department may epekto ito sa suplay. 24 Oras is GMA Network’s flagship newscast, anchored by Mel Tiangco, Vicky Morales and Emil Sumangil. It airs on GMA-7 Mondays … Read more