Making it easier for F-Droid to package Mozilla Firefox

[nalexander]

@Manizuca

Hi Nick,

As other have said, thanks for the interest.

Hi @Manizuca! Thanks for doing the hard work to get Firefox for Android into the F-Droid market. The localization bits can be… crufty

@Manizuca

As you found and, there are a couple of issues when building without GCM, some of them discussed at bug 1324331, and the most recent one that you addressed on your bug.

Currently, most of the work for firefox on F-Droid consist of:

Removing binaries

Can you explain what this means? Do binaries mean things like proprietary codec blobs? I didn’t see anything like this when I looked in the F-Droid build scripts at https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/metadata/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid.txt#L3959-3989.

@Manizuca

Removing Crash Reporter, Firefox Health Report & Telemetry

These should all be supported as mozconfig options. If they’re not doing the right things for you, I consider that a bug, and would appreciate being CCed on a ticket in the Core :: Build Config component at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org. In particular, Telemetry is growing in scope and intrusiveness, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we need a little focused attention to ensure we’re not accidentally pushing bits to Mozilla that F-Droid users don’t want exposed.

@Manizuca

The binary data that we remove is typically for testing, but the build fails when the binaries are not there, so we have to remove all the references to testing data (TEST_MANIFESTS, MOCHITEST, etc) at different moz.build files.I actually haven’t tried if with the new build system its more easy to just disable the code that makes the build fail that removing all the references. It will really help an option to disable build-failing when only test data is missing.

More details would be helpful here. I would expect that --disable-tests in your mozconfig wouldn’t fail the builds, but I don’t know what’s at play.

@Manizuca

We had some report that firefox sends data to some server even with Crash Reporter, Firefox Health Report & Telemetry being disabled, so we disabled them at the code. AFAIK, some telemetry code has been removed in the last versions so its possible that is not the case any-more, but im not sure about the future plan for telemetry on android so we keep it disabled. Any information about the future for telemetry would be appreciated.

Firefox for Android has been pretty focused on using newer technologies to A/B test and really understand our user base, so we’ve used Adjust (a German tracker with a good privacy policy), Switchboard (an A/B module that we run an in-house backend for), and Leanplum (a marketing application about which I know little). It’s my belief that we’ll be able to make building with Google Play Services imply no Adjust and Leanplum. I don’t know what the right outcome for Switchboard is for F-Droid – you don’t want Mozilla’s instance, but you probably don’t want to run your own (which has a non-trivial cost). I’m pretty sure that everything will work if you “opt out” of Switchboard, but I don’t know if that’s easy to arrange at build-time. We can try to make it so.

@Manizuca

Finally, soon firefox for android will only be supporting building with gradle. The last time i tried a gradle build within f-droid wasn’t pretty, but that probably should be work at our side.

Surely the majority of F-Droid’s packages are built with Gradle, so this problem must be addressed in some way. Firefox for Android’s Gradle configuration is pretty complex, but it should “just work” to run mach build after the dependencies are in place. I expect that F-Droid could work through these dependency issues fairly easily. I can provide links to what Firefox for Android does: the tl;dr is that we collect Gradle dependencies using a proxy Maven repository running Nexus Sonatype. It’s not that complicated; start reading at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/taskcluster/scripts/misc/android-gradle-dependencies.sh and the linked scripts.

Thanks for your feedback!
Nick