[tor-bugs] #27539 [Applications/Tor Browser]: Create plan for releasing on F-Droid

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#27539: Create plan for releasing on F-Droid
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 Reporter:  sysrqb                               |          Owner:  tbb-
                                                 |  team
     Type:  enhancement                          |         Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium                               |      Milestone:
Component:  Applications/Tor Browser             |        Version:
 Severity:  Normal                               |     Resolution:
 Keywords:  tbb-mobile, TorBrowserTeam201902,    |  Actual Points:
  TBA-8.5                                        |
Parent ID:  #26318                               |         Points:
 Reviewer:                                       |        Sponsor:
                                                 |  Sponsor8
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Comment (by sysrqb):

 quick update here. I like this plan in theory, where we run our own repo
 and publish updates on f-droid.org and our own. My main worry is our
 ability for running more services like this as an organization. I think
 this is something we can think about more and make plans for in the (not
 too distant) future - maybe. In the meantime, I'd like to get f-droid.org
 builds working now.

 I currently have a metadata file ready and it successfully builds tor
 browser using tor-browser-build within a fdroidserver instance I installed
 locally. My main worry here is how long the build process takes. On a
 bare-metal older laptop I'm using, the entire build process for armv7
 takes roughly 3.5 hours. I'm under the impression F-Droid use VMs for each
 app build, and there's an upper bound of 7 hours(?) per build. If this is
 true, then I won't be surprised if we hit that timeout limit. One of the
 main reasons for this is artifacts are not cached across builds - so all
 repos and files are cloned/downloaded for every build iteration. I
 understand why this is important for a general apk builder, but this is
 painful for a large project like tor browser.

 In addition, the Tor Browser build process requires 40+ GB of disk space
 and 2+ GB of RAM, and I'm not sure if F-Droid's default build server will
 support this.

 I haven't confirmed reproducible builds between our apk and fdroid yet.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/27539#comment:14>
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