Updates on BLW - Bitcoin and Lightning Wallet
After the last reports on BLW many things were improved:
- "… 750MB download later …" -- at the time you attempted to build, you had to download 750MB because APKs were being committed to the Git repository, now that is not the case anymore.
- "The issue about reproducibility was deleted just like every other issue on their GitHub" -- this happened because the repository was completely wiped out. It was necessary to remove the APKs that were committed to Git since the first days of the wallet, and since it would be impossible to keep the Git history anyway it was decided to delete the repository and create a new one.
- "there is no v0.4 and upon further investigation it turns out the project doesn’t update the versionName with every release" -- now there are clear releases and release numbers (and names!) and the distributed APKs correspond to these releases.
-
"gradle version is outdated.", "if there is a good reason for using an old gradle version (2.3 is from early 2015), the team should explain that and give clear build instructions." -- indeed, this part is still not great. I believe the old Gradle version is necessary because of the Android Scala plugin (which is not being maintained and thus is only compatible with this ancient Gradle version) the wallet uses requires it. It is possible to use Gradle 3.3. I'm very unexperienced in the Android world, but was able to build using the following instructions (and assuming
JAVA_HOME
pointing to a JRE OpenJdk 1.8,ANDROID_HOME
pointing to an Android SDK directory andANDROID_NDK_HOME
pointing to an Android NDK directory):
wget https://downloads.gradle-dn.com/distributions/gradle-3.3-bin.zip
unzip gradle-3.3-bin.zip
./gradle-3.3/bin/gradle assembleDebug
- BLW is now on F-Droid, so it should be easily reproducible, right? I wasn't able to understand the automated process F-Droid uses to build its apps, but I'll hope you know that part.
If something can be improved please open an issue on the BLW repository directly -- and this time it won't be deleted). Thanks!
Edited by fiatjaf