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

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#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, TBA-8.5,                 |  Actual Points:
  TorBrowserTeam201903, tbb-8.5                  |
Parent ID:  #26318                               |         Points:
 Reviewer:                                       |        Sponsor:
                                                 |  Sponsor8
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Comment (by eighthave):

 The F-Droid community would generally love to support Tor Project, so
 don't consider the current setup something to workaround.  I think there
 can even be special, hard-coded exceptions for `org.torproject.*`
 packages.  The builder VM has 4-8GB RAM, and could have more if that would
 be useful.  There is no disk space limitation so far, just timeouts on the
 whole process.

 I imagine that the large majority of the TBA build time comes from
 building Fennec.  f-droid.org has been building and shipping Fennec builds
 for years, so we know they work.  They've always been handled by one
 volunteer, so they haven't required tons of work.  Per-build timeouts are
 specified in the metadata file, the default is 2 hours.  f-droid.org
 currently has a 36 hour timeout per build cycle, that could be spent all
 on a single job. Looking at IceCat's most recent build log, it took 4.5
 hours.  You can see all the build logs here:

 * https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/org.gnu.icecat
 * https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid

 fdroid has its `srclibs` mechanism for caching reusable library builds,
 that might be useful.  The F-Droid community is also open to ideas for
 improving things, even if specifically for Tor Project.  One simple thing
 would be to make the buildserver always try `org.torproject.*` builds
 first in each build cycle.  There is a separate process that queues
 updates, so that quirk would only take effect when there is a
 `org.torproject.*` update to build.

 **CI builds on fdroid infrastructure**

 We have a few instances of the complete build infrastructure running for
 CI tests.  We also have an alpha gitlab-runner of the full buildserver VM.
 For TBA, there could be a GitLab repo somewhere where TBA is built on an
 fdroid buildserver on every push.  Here are two publicly visible
 instances:

 * https://jenkins.debian.net/job/reproducible_fdroid_build_apps/
 * https://verification.f-droid.org/

 **Running the repo**

 If the fdroid repo was run on https://www.torproject.org/fdroid, then no
 new server or system needed.  It is just copying static files to an
 directory in an existing webserver.  Then the direct download links can
 just be symlinks or hard links to the files in the fdroid repo, that is
 easily scripted.  It could be a static link for the latest release, since
 he `fdroid update` can generate a symlink to the 'current version'.  The
 whole fdroidserver tool suite is build/sign/publish automation, since
 f-droid.org is only possible with a large amount of automation.

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/27539#comment:19>
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