I’m thinking of helping out by trying to build VLC… but what requires the fdroid team to build it anyway? Are there proprietary bits that need to be omitted? There’s a message on the videolan wiki saying “Warning: Please, do not put pre-release test binaries or git-compiles on software sites or on user-forums. We’ve had bad experiences with this before and we do not appreciate it.” source
EDIT: Nevermind, I read the Building Applications link.
@weasel I think those who have worked on the VLC builds are all burnt out from the amazing shittiness of that build system, and from all the related grumpy comments. So no one is currently tracking it that closely. It needs some fresh eyes working on it.
Ok I’ll repeat my question for the last time, since nobody got my point.
That page I linked above says that you already have VLC 2.0.6 working.
VLC on GooglePlayStore is v 2.0.6 .
VLC on the official website is 2.0.6 .
The question here is not why the later developing versions can’t build, I don’t care. What I ask is why you don’t make v 2.0.6 available on Fdroid?
Thank you
Because it’s difficult to build.
Fdroid team is not the team behind VLC development.
Why don’t you grab a dev of VLC and ask him to come on this forum to help Fdroid team?
VLC build instructions look simple and straightforward until you start following them. Even minor differences in build environment can cause issues (like automake 1.15 vs 1.15.1).
Sometimes they forget to update their source code.
For example, VLC 2.5.2 requires libvlc to be built from commit 1c02164. But the version they distribute was built with libvlc from ef7c26f5a7 (you can get this from logcat, grep “core libvlc: revision”). BTW, this mismatch can be the reason why F-Droid’s VLC 2.5.2 crashes.
Official 2.5.3 uses libvlc built from cbfa98bd98, which has not been published at all.
Hopefully those examples explain why we cannot build VLC.
Apparently some brave sould went through the pain of creating an up-to-date version of VLC player in F-Droid. The build is green and the latest released upstream version (2.5.12) is available
So why can I only find the VLC app in the F-Droid archive repositories? There are no known vulnabilities for that version and it is up-to-date, no? Can somebody enlighten me on this?
So why can I only find the VLC app in the F-Droid archive repositories?
See my comments above. VLC on F-Droid is abandoned because nobody has time to package it. There are only 3 maintainers per about 170 regularly updated apps.
I don’t get it: “nobody has time to package it” but ARCHIVE contains tens
of versions, of which at least 6 were build during the last year by YOU.
Including the very LAST, FRESHEST version.
So why on earth it’s not in the main repo?
BTW this update rate is much, much better then for the most apps in main
repo.
F-Droid is basically the same as a distro like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. F-Droid builds apps from source using a standard build environment, just like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. F-Droid requires that anything included in the official repositories be built from source on its own builders, just like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. If that isn’t feasible, VLC or anyone could host an fdroid repo of binaries. Some random docker image would not be an acceptable build system for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc., and it is also not accepted by F-Droid.
I don’t use VLC on Android, so I’m not the person to continue this discussion.