Idea of an archive repo per app and a small and a big archive

[Jens]

I just read Dude, Where's My Archive? | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository and got the idea that each app could have an archive repo. If an user needs an old versions of an app there could be a switch below “allow Beta-Updates ” (translated from german) like “Archive versions (for this app) ”.

The archive repo could get divided in a small archive that has some versions and a big archive repo with all versions. On the server the archive repo for every single app could have a low priority in updating them.

If a user uses an archive repo of a single app the mirrors with the small archive only could maybe be useless.

[Jens]

A friend of mine had a nice idea: There should be an archive repo for each android api version with the last 3 versions of each app fitting to that android api.

[Licaon_Kter]

Oh come on, why add all these layers of complexity, why generate 4500 indexes each cycle?

[Jens]

4500 indexes

I thought that computer time would be cheap especially if it is low priority time. Developer time is more valuable.

If people use an old android version and search for an editor they get results from the hopefully more recent software. If they search for a special program they really like, they can activate the “incompatible versions” (translated from german) look into the app list, activate the old archive versions for this special app and deactivate the incompatible versions. Next time when they look into an app category they hopefully get more recent software compared to with an activated archive repo.

One index per android api

What do you think about this solution? Android 15 is api level 35. Either there could be a solution with e.g. five latest versions of each app for this api level or all app versions that fit for this api version.

[frief]

The part with “a small and a big archive” could/would be attractive for my use case.

My normal use case is just refreshing the archive to see whether there are updates.
So it would be sufficient if the big complete archive is downloaded once and on refresh a small version of the archive (no icons, no text or a diff file) is patched/merged into the big archive.

(My mobile internet quota is 500GB per month, so probably not a typical use case or something to design for. And I see the effort to implement it…)

[Licaon_Kter]

For a while now F-Droid Client uses delta index updates, so if you’ve updated in the last 10 index updates you’ll not get the full index, but just the newer stuff. This means if you update weekly it’s like 200Kb,