Make Tor hidden service repos visible in the UI

I have 2 repos add to F-Droid which are Tor hidden services and have the same ones as standard URLs. Now it's very hard to distinguish these, as they are identically named (and F-Droid offers no edit option AFAIK).

My suggestion is to add an UI indicator that marks Tor hidden service repos e.g. with the Tor/Onion logo :).

Title changed from [Feature Request] make Tor hidden service repos visible in the UI to Make Tor hidden service repos visible in the UI

Added feature label

Thanks for taking the time to post these feature requests. Could I please get you to clarify with an example? For example, is it a matter of having two Guardian Project repos (see here):

• https://guardianproject.info/fdroid/repo
• http://bdf2wcxujkg6qqff.onion/fdroid/repo

Which both happen to have the same name and provide the same metadata?

Or is it more along the lines of two completely unrelated repositories which happen to have the same name, such as "Custom Repository" or something generic like that?

Either way, I think that we should do this, and we should do it by putting the URL under the repository title in the repository list. This would be done using the same style as the app summary shown under the app name in the main list of apps.

We could put an icon to indicate a hidden service, but I would caution against that until we have a good icon for non-hidden service repos. The metadata indeed has an "icon" attribute, perhaps we should start using that in the UI. Then, we could show, e.g. the F-Droid icon for the F-Droid repository and then overlay an onion over the top if it is a hidden service.

Added ui label

Hi Peter,

in my example I was talking about the 2 Guardian Project repos, which are displayed with the same name, as they seem to share the same metadata. I like your idea to display the repo URL as a first step. Also an option to override the repo name could be considered.

UX wise, it would be discriminating I guess to just use an onion icon, when we have a hidden service? So yeah I have no good solution for the non-onion versions. IMHO there are 4 types of repositories, http, http + HS, https and https + HS.

I think this should be solved in a more generic way. Any two repos with different URLs may have the same name, this is not restricted to regular vs hidden service repos. This could be solved by showing the URL alongside the name, for example.

So yeah, agreeing with Peter. And I don't think discriminating by TLS and onion will be enough. Two repos with different domains/paths might have the same name too.

See also #527 (closed). It might be easiest to resolve both by adding an optional, locally defined, free-form text "alias" field to each defined repo. It might make sense to pre-fill the alias with a "suggested" URI-like scheme that's easy to sort. For example:

guardianproject.info:onion:"Guardian Project Official Releases"
f-droid.org:https:"F-Droid"

I admit, the icons would be nice, too. ;)

Outside of displaying the repo icon, I think this issue is best not solved in the client UI. There are two pieces here:

1. mirror URLs for repos, like Guardian Project's .onion address
2. totally different repos with the same or similar names

For mirror URLs, those should all be transparently considered the same repo, especially since we are adding official support for mirrors fdroidserver#14 (closed). For 2, we should expect maintainers to make short, clear repo names that do not conflict with others. And when they do not, ask them to change them. Once we have mirror support in the client, I don't think situation 2 will be very common at all, but would take a lot of work to fix in the client UI.

mentioned in merge request !222 (merged)

changed the description

added repositories label

@eighthave this might be handy

Is this still an issue? Repos can have onion services as mirrors and/or canonical address. Also, we now show the repo icon, so I wonder if there's something left to do here.

closed