Mattermost app required by a whole movement

thanks for all the hard work! All you Mattermost users: if you want to prevent this from happening in the future, please communicate to the Mattermost maintainers that it is important that it is easy to build the app! One simple way to do that is to click thumbs up on any related issues or pull requests on GitHub. It also good to file new issues for each problem.

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The Version 1.21 failed building in F-Droid because of

truncate: cannot open ā€˜ā€¦/ā€¦/node_modules/react-native/local-cli/server/util/external/xselā€™ for writing: No such file or directory

https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/com.mattermost.rnbeta/lastbuild

Known issue, since 1.19.x: Mattermost - try to fix build 198 (!5022) Ā· Merge requests Ā· F-Droid / Data Ā· GitLab

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First huge thanks to @Rudloff and all other developers that made it possible to have a more modern Mattermost app version.
It was requested here: Mattermost app required by a whole movement

This forum post is closed now and i cant write what i write here in the old forum post.

Thats why i create here this new one. Some code seems to not be merged and thats why a F-Droid pull request have been closed without merging the code.

What have happened here?
@Rudloff wrote here about some pullrequest have to be merged. They are closed now. Is there still something that have to be merged? Could a dev send a new pullrequest upstream or to f-droid to fix this outdated mattermost issue? That would be great.
There are always recent updates in the mattermost development. Stying at a outdated version breaks many things.

We need someone with the knowledge to fix it: Publish app on f-droid Ā· Issue #566 Ā· mattermost/mattermost-mobile Ā· GitHub

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If you are suspicious of Google, Mattermost is written in the programming language, Go (or Golang), a programming language and runtime environment developed by Google. Although Go is open-source that doesnā€™t necessarily guarantee security, and as such privacy. Having said that, the same can be said for any open-source language and runtime environment, although Java has been around a longer been developed by a more independent base, and is arguably a safer language and environment.

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Please donā€™t spread FUD! :expressionless:

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I felt the dissonance needed to be addressed in a fair, balanced way. I donā€™t mean to create FUD. In reality, the tech giants need no help from me in that department.

Any programming language can be used for good or bad, Iā€™m pretty sure that the same mine that got that iron out of the earth for your spoon, also supplied some anti-personnel bomb manufacturer. Thatā€™s what you said right?

Yes, with an important addition of ā€œif you are wanting to go Google-free, Mattermost might not be as far removed from Google as you might preferā€. Explaining only this aspect in isolation would create more FUD, so I added a caveat to balance the argument, that way the person can make up their own mind.

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It wonā€™t be google free since the rest of the code of the whole Android version is written/touched by Google even when using a custom ROM, not because the app is written in Goā€¦cā€™mon.

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To me, it seems Android and derivatives are more rigorously evaluated against vulnerabilities. Whistleblowers and journalists (eg. Vault 7) have even come out over the years to highlight vulnerabilities being exploited by crime groups. Thatā€™s not to say that Android and derivatives are perfectly secure, but they do seem close to the mark.

I digged into the logfiles.
The issue is a combination of the used gradle version but more at the react-native-device-info.
Its been added to gradle for mattermost app here: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile/blob/master/android/settings.gradle#L32

What react-native version is been used when building for f-droid? 0.61.2 is the recent one. Recent version from react-native-device-info is 4.0.1.

The used gradle version is 5.2.1. The latest stable release is 5.6.3.

Does using gradle 5.6.3 with react-native 0.61.2 and react-native-device-info 4.0.1 still produce the same build error? Could someone test that?

So what? We should use whatever version upstream wants.

The one that they want, this is something that upstream decides.

Hereā€™s a log: Mattermost 239 fdroidserver fail ($1906573) Ā· Snippets Ā· GitLab

Version 1.31.2 was build on 2020-06-07 . Since then no new version have been build. I had the hope that when a new version can be build again, from there on at least few more version could be build.
Is there some simple to explain reason why only one single version could be build?

The app should be renamed in f-droid. Its not a ā€œbetaā€ version any more. The build version is stable for long time.

We canā€™t (yet) build it only from open-sourceā€¦ code.

I keep trying from time to time but this needs upstream knowledge (react-native heavy), and they donā€™t care that much.

Itā€™s on my TODO, as time permitsā€¦

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I keep trying from time to time

Wow. Thatā€™s really hard and fatiguing. I stay away from any React Native apps.

I just offer them the logs, and maybe I try to scan-ignore some random lib. Then I hope upstream helps us.

But yes, tiring specially since it take 10x more time to run a (eventually failing) build, blocking me from other apps. Eg. Manyverse take 80mins with 6cores/20GbRAM ;(