FDroidCompliance¶

Introduction¶

F-Droid is a community-maintained software repository for Android based operating systems. It is similar to the Google Play store.

Replicant has depended very heavily on F-Droid for a long time now. End users expect app "stores" on their smart phones.

Unfortunately, F-Droid is not currently compliant with the FSF's Free Software Distribution Guidelines, which required Replicant to remove F-Droid from its upcoming 6.0 0004 release so that Replicant can continue to be FSDG compliant.

Much discussion has already been had within Replicant and between Replicant and F-Droid about how F-Droid can be modified in order to make it FSDG compliant so that it can be included again in Replicant in future releases.

F-Droid's build server has not purely free from proprietary blobs for a while now: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver/-/issues/383

It is important for F-Droid to be built using free tools.

Android has a decentralized app building process. This can be a very positive thing, fostering a much more diverse and playful ecosystem than app stores that Google and Apple provide on their smartphones's OSes.

Due to the freedom issues in the F-Droid build system though, a threat exists to user privacy and security.

One of these freedom issues is the fact that far too many pre-builds exist.

Replicant wants an app distribution system that runs a free toolchain so that users can rely on a fully free ecosystem.

One way of achieving this might be to utilize beuc's rebuilds: https://android-rebuilds.beuc.net/

Replicant wants to write environment setup bash scripts to build FDroid with beuc's version of the SDK in order to be able to provide a reproducible build environment that others can test.

Another freedom issue with F-Droid is that F-Droid includes apps with anti-features that are not compatible with the GNU FSDG. These apps are available alongside apps that are compatible and they are only marked with these anti-features. See #1629 for development efforts and further information on this topic. https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/FDroid

Plan¶

Discuss with F-Droid to find a way to implement the FSDG compliance¶

Task	Budget	Comments	Deliverable
Define with F-Droid upstream which properties we can use in package definition to comply with the FSDG guidelines	Hard to predict as it depends on the outcome of the discussion with F-Droid => Replicant funding		Specifications that are ready to be implemented by Fil bergamo
Discuss how to implement build time whitelists and blacklists	Hard to predict as it depends on the outcome of the discussion with F-Droid => Replicant funding		Precise specifications that are ready to be implemented by Fil bergamo
Replicant F-Droid fork package in F-Droid	Nlnet? Rough number of hours		Package can be built with F-Droid tools, ideally upstream it

Precise specifications: specifications that are clear enough to be implemented without making mistakes, and clear enough to understand for people using it.
Example: non-fsdg compliant property in the package definition.

• Specs for implementation:
  Tag format: "Antifeature: non-fsdg-compliant, <reason>"
• Definition:
  • Property that indicates that the package doesn't meet the FSDG guidelines as per <fsdg guidelines address>.
  • reason: textual description of why the package is not fsdg compliant. (see parabola blacklist for examples + git-url of paraobla blacklist repo + file)

Implementation¶

Person: Fil Bergamo

Task	Budget	Comments	Deliverable
Implement the parsing of the properties	Hard to predict as it depends on the outcome of the discussion with F-Droid => Replicant funding
Build F-Droid from an FSDG compliant distribution	Hard to predict => Replicant funding	Replicant 6 can't be built with FSDG compliant distros but Replicant 4.2, 9.0 and probably 10.0 too can => We need F-Droid to be built from an FSDG compliant distributions	Building F-Droid from an FSDG compliant distribution + a quick HOWTO
Implement build time whitelists / blacklists	Nlnet? Rough number of hours		Can build F-Droid with custom blacklist and whitelists + quick HOWTO
Replicant F-Droid fork package in F-Droid	Nlnet? Rough number of hours		Package can be built with F-Droid tools, ideally upstream it