Change something in my app's meta file

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to make a slight update of my meta file. Someone has recommended to add a website URL for the page that exists already anyway.

Now I may be familiar with programing in general and I can handle my app’s repository, but I’m still struggling a lot with this entire fork/merge stuff.

When I login to Gitlab I still have my fork of the Fdroiddata. But that must have been outdated long ago.

Now would I need to update it first? Or delete it and fork anew? Would a deletion have any negative consequences?

If there’s already a manual about how to change something about an already published app, please let me know. I searched a lot, but I was only able to find instructions for publishing new apps.

So, there are two ways to go about this:

Delete and web edit

This is simplest, but only works on the following conditions:

  1. You do not have any open merge requests for fdroid/fdroiddata
  2. You only want to edit a single file
  3. You don’t have write access to fdroid/fdroiddata (if you do, you surely would know)

If you only intend to make small changes, I recommend just every time deleting your fork, then going to the file you want to change in fdroid/fdroiddata and clicking “Edit” (NOT “Web IDE”, that one will lock up your browser).

Because you don’t have the access rights to edit fdroid/fdroiddata, GitLab will create a new fork immediately.

Synced mirror

This is the cleanest, future-proof way, but does require you to know about git branching and stuff, so it’s a bit more difficult if you’re still new to git.

To set up your fork to stay up-to-date with fdroid/fdroiddata, you need to go to your fork, then to Settings → Repository → Mirroring repositories and then set F-Droid / Data · GitLab as mirror with direction Pull:

After you do this, your master branch will always stay up-to-date with the official fdroiddata master branch. Whenever you want to make a change, you can then create a new branch, make your changes and make a merge request manually.

Hope this helps!

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Thanks a lot for your explanations!

I’ve tried to go for synchronization first.

When setting up the sync I got the red error message first:

Then I removed that sync setting, set it up again, but checked the checkbox saying “overwrite diverged branch”. Then instead of the first error message I got this one:

Do you know what that means?

I can of course delete my fork, too. I’m just trying to learn something :slight_smile:.

You made changes to your master branch and under Settings → Repository → Protected branches you have force-push disallowed on master (as per GitLab default settings). Your own changes to the master branch will be lost if you continue and tell it to overwrite divergent branches, so be sure there’s nothing in there you don’t want to lose.

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Awesome, it’s working now!

Now one final question for my understanding: Do I have to disallow force-push again?

I’d now think that every attempt to change something in my fork would get overwritten pretty instantly with this setting turned on.

That setting doesn’t matter much. After all, you should never edit the master branch, but every time you want to make a change create a new branch.

True indeed.
Guess I tend to forget that as in my own programs I’m used to only use a master and a development branch. The latter is kind of continuously recycled because I don’t really work/think in “features”, but more like a bit of that here, another fix here, etc.

Thanks a lot for your help!! I appreciate it.

1 Like

I’m using this workflow: Refresh client apps data - #4 by Licaon_Kter

Thanks a lot. I’ll keep it in mind for next time. This time I’ve even only used Gitlab’s web editor for my simple change.

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