We could again host a 60 minute self-organised session. (I think registration for those is not yet open, but will be soon?)
How to spend the time
Of course, we should have an idea of how we spend the time, lest everyone sits around awkwardly
One idea would be to have 30-45 mins of short talks. Maybe 2 or 3 talks of 10 to 15 minutes each?
And then for the remaining 15-30 minutes we could split into smaller discussion groups (that can be continued outside if we need to vacate the room).
One chatting about packaging, another group chatting about inclusion policy and anti-features, another about client development, etc.
If it turns out that we have many talk ideas, we could also have a “talks session” on one day, and another informal “drinks and chat” session on another day.
Talk ideas
In general, I think the session should be focussed on devs/active contributors who know what F-Droid is (EDIT: Including app devs that release their apps on F-Droid). It shouldn’t be an introductionary “this is what F-Droid is and here’s why you should use it”.
As a semi-active-drive-by contributor, I would be interested to hear from the core contributors about things like:
How the building, signing, publishing, web hosting infra stacks work.
Sure, I have read the docs and some of the Ansible code.
But as a a non-core contributor, I have never actively worked with that stuff,
so I would be curious to hear a talk describing in more detail how it works. Maybe even a demo?
“Frontline firefighting stories”, random fun anecdotes about F-Droid
Hot take: A walk through talk of how the Firefox derivates are built.
I’ve seen the Fennec buildscript and it scared me. A walk-through talk of process that it takes for a Firefox update to be FOSS-ified (from Mozilla pushing the code to their repo until I download the APK from F-Droid) would be super interesting.
General F-Droid project status (maybe this is a talk for a council member?).
What is the future direction of F-Droid? How is the funding status? Do we need (more) people working full-time on F-Droid (packaging, client dev)? Do we need more server donations? How can we speed up build cycle times? What are the most burning problems where we need contributors?
I only did a few small changes to F-Droid itself (Client UI, quite a few years ago). However, at a previous congress, meeting up with other FOSS Android developers was great I’m definitely interested in meeting up I will also bring some AntennaPod stickers with me.
I’d love to join the meetup (and also meet you @ByteHamster!), as an app maintainer, though I might not be there all days. Another hot take topic I’m interested in is getting an idea on how many users an app has without invading privacy. If that is even possible
Yes, I saw those, thank you! I’m just wondering if there is a more complete picture we can get. I know a lot of mirrors don’t provide any stats and weren’t responsive to a request in that direction. I don’t want to go to deep here though in order to not derail the topic
How about setting the location to the self-organized session space? Then it appears in the Fahrplan for others to find, even if they do not visit the forum here.
Thanks to everyone who came, it was a nice meetup!
We were roughly 10 to 15 people. Some users, some devs. The devs were from Thunderbird/K-9 Mail, KDE, NewPipe, CryptoCam, AntennaPod, and maybe others that I am forgetting.
Some things we talked about: Jetpack Compose, cross-platform development (Flutter, Kotlin Multiplatform, Rust, Qt), funding work, finding new maintainers, how F-Droid may be affected by EU regulations forcing app stores to do age verification.
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