[tbb-bugs] #27539 [Applications/Tor Browser]: Create plan for releasing on F-Droid

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#27539: Create plan for releasing on F-Droid
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 Reporter:  sysrqb                               |          Owner:  tbb-
                                                 |  team
     Type:  enhancement                          |         Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium                               |      Milestone:
Component:  Applications/Tor Browser             |        Version:
 Severity:  Normal                               |     Resolution:
 Keywords:  tbb-mobile, TorBrowserTeam201902,    |  Actual Points:
  TBA-8.5                                        |
Parent ID:  #26318                               |         Points:
 Reviewer:                                       |        Sponsor:
                                                 |  Sponsor8
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Comment (by boklm):

 Replying to [comment:14 sysrqb]:

 > I currently have a metadata file ready and it successfully builds tor
 browser using tor-browser-build within a fdroidserver instance I installed
 locally. My main worry here is how long the build process takes. On a
 bare-metal older laptop I'm using, the entire build process for armv7
 takes roughly 3.5 hours. I'm under the impression F-Droid use VMs for each
 app build, and there's an upper bound of 7 hours(?) per build. If this is
 true, then I won't be surprised if we hit that timeout limit. One of the
 main reasons for this is artifacts are not cached across builds - so all
 repos and files are cloned/downloaded for every build iteration. I
 understand why this is important for a general apk builder, but this is
 painful for a large project like tor browser.

 I'm wondering if there could be an option in the F-Droid build to save
 some files at the end of a build, and restore them when starting a new
 builds.

 I think the directories we would want to keep are `out/`, `git_clones/`,
 `gclient/`.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/27539#comment:15>
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