Contributing

Reporting issues

If you find an issue in the client, you can use our Issue Tracker. Make sure that it hasn't yet been reported by searching first.

Remember to include the following information:

Android version
Device model
F-Droid version
Steps to reproduce the issue
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, plus 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.

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 parenthesis
Commented fallthroughs
Braces are always used after if, for and while

The current code base doesn't follow it entirely, but new code should follow it. 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 --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.

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:

gradle connectedCheck

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 get run.

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: XYYZNN. So for example, 1.3.1 would be 103150 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.

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