RFC: Client maintenance sponsored by the Calyx Institute

The official client app is an essential piece of the F-Droid ecosystem. Therefore, the Calyx Institute as a member and benefactor of the F-Droid community would like to offer sponsoring a maintainer position to ensure continuous maintenance of the client app independent of grants or available volunteer time. To this end, a second maintainer could be added in the future to reduce the bus factor.

As a first maintainer, the Institute would like to suggest Torsten Grote due to his familiarity with the code base and due to his substantial contributions in the past year. We hope that this would free up time and energy of the current maintainer(s), so those could benefit F-Droid in other areas.

Yay

Glad to see Hans and several others gave it the thumbs-up ! What are the next steps ?

changed milestone to %Manage Repos overhaul

added Calyx Institute label

@nickcalyx this is great! Do you have a description of what Calyx Institute is going to fund?

I can second @grote as a maintainer for fdroidclient.

Tasks: (including but not limited to)

• Try to identify and fix bugs, prioritizing critical issues
• Responding to issues filed
• Reviewing and merging MRs
• Continued improvements as the Android app landscape evolves
• Making releases as needed

Is there anything else that you can think of a must do for a fdroidclient maintainer?

Sounds great. Is there any kind of officialdom that Calyx needs from F-Droid? Contracts, proposals, official letters from the org?

No, I don't think so, not at this time. If something comes up later, will let you know.

This should help move things along much better. I think it is especially important to get regular review on merge requests and issues. That area is sorely lacking, and will pay off. There are a number of people who want to contribute to fdroidclient maintenance, the blocker has been someone who has the time and knowledge to dig in and review those contributions. As for freeing up existing maintainers, I appreciate that goal. Given the workload, I don't think we can yet afford to have anyone give up their existing tasks in fdroidclient maintenance (me included). fdroidclient has been running on a skeleton crew for a while now.

I don't think we can yet afford to have anyone give up their existing tasks in fdroidclient maintenance (me included)

Do you mind spelling out what your existing tasks are and which ones you'd hand-over and which ones you would like to continue doing?

Do you see any issues with those tasks relying on volunteer time?

Sure, I'll spell them out as much as I can. I've been documenting things as I go along in the wiki, like the Release Process doc.

At the first in-person F-Droid team meeting, we discussed funding and how that should be structured in F-Droid. We generally agreed that F-Droid will control what is called F-Droid, via trademarks, etc. And funded work can be handled by any org. The key is if said org wants to have its work considered officially F-Droid, it needs to follow the general guidelines as laid out by the community and board. We're still hammering those out, but in general, something like Debian or other similarly-minded free software projects. For example, we agreed that funded work should be as transparent as possible. Our current practice is to have a blog post that outlines who the funder is and describes what work is being funded. As discussed on a call, there should be such a blog post from Calyx on f-droid.org. I believe that either @cde or @grote indented to write that up? Here's one example from a different funder:

https://f-droid.org/2022/02/05/decentralizing-distribution.html

We're working on the blogpost at 16966: posts: CalyxOS & F-Droid | https://review.calyxos.org/c/CalyxOS/calyxos.org/+/16966

and after discussion with the F-Droid community and the existing maintainer(s), which was approved.

and after discussing it with the F-Droid community and the existing maintainer(s), this was approved. here https://review.calyxos.org/c/CalyxOS/calyxos.org/+/16966/9/pages/_posts/2023-07-12-f-droid.md#17

Maybe remove the duplicated link here https://review.calyxos.org/c/CalyxOS/calyxos.org/+/16966/9/pages/_posts/2023-07-12-f-droid.md#70 as it was mentioned above?

Thanks, made the first change.

Duplication was intentional if you're just reading that section. It's just a link anyways.

mentioned in merge request fdroidclient!1043 (closed)

changed milestone to %launch basic

Calyx post about all of this is now live at https://calyxos.org/news/2023/09/04/f-droid/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/CalyxOS/comments/169toc1/calyxos_fdroid/

closed