Can't be updated in F-Droid due to proprietary binaries & a bug report

[tetris4]

Hello,

I have been using rbb for a while now through the F-droid.org repository, and I realized there is a bug: My upvotes for posts are not registered on the main site. For some reason I can't see them when I login to the reddit webpage on my laptop.

I was going to open an issue about that, but then I checked and found out that Fdroid still uses version 2.3, and now 3.0 is available. So I asked for an update to this and the answer was that it can't be done, cause there's a proprietary binary in the source: https://github.com/btmura/rbb/tree/master/libs.

Are you aware of these issues? Any chance for this to be fixed?

[btmura]

Hi tetris4,

There could be 2 causes that might result in the voting not to work. If you changed your password, rbb won't be able to sync the votes back to reddit. However, you should get a notification that rbb could not login. If you have syncing disabled, then rbb won't be able to sync the votes back either.

rbb 3.0 uses the YouTube player binary provided from Google, so it can play YouTube videos within the app. I think to fix it I would need to create a separate branch of rbb that does not have the YouTube code in it.

If F-droid has an issue with using the compatibility support jar (the other binary in the directory), then I don't think there is anyway to fix rbb for F-droid. However, there is source code for that one, so I don't think that one is the issue.

If we can confirm that the issues is only with the YouTube jar, then I don't mind maintaining a separate open source branch that has the YouTube code removed.

[ElDiablo666]

Is there any possibility of a better workaround? Perhaps writing a module
that loads YouTube directly instead of Google's proprietary garbageware?
The only reason I use and follow this app is because it is Free Software.
Brian, please do not trade convenience for liberty, my friend!

On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 8:08 PM, Brian Muramatsu
notifications@github.comwrote:

Hi tetris4,

There could be 2 causes that might result in the voting not to work. If
you changed your password, rbb won't be able to sync the votes back to
reddit. However, you should get a notification that rbb could not login. If
you have syncing disabled, then rbb won't be able to sync the votes back
either.

rbb 3.0 uses the YouTube player binary provided from Google, so it can
play YouTube videos within the app. I think to fix it I would need to
create a separate branch of rbb that does not have the YouTube code in it.

If F-droid has an issue with using the compatibility support jar (the
other binary in the directory), then I don't think there is anyway to fix
rbb for F-droid. However, there is source code for that one, so I don't
think that one is the issue.

If we can confirm that the issues is only with the YouTube jar, then I
don't mind maintaining a separate open source branch that has the YouTube
code removed.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/286#issuecomment-26877523
.

[CiaranG]

Just to confirm that it's only the proprietary YouTube jar file that's the problem, F-Droid-wise. The compatibility jar is FOSS.

If you're happy to maintain a separate FOSS branch, that would be great, we'll definitely use it.

[CiaranG]

(but if what ElDiablo666 suggested is possible, that would be even better for everyone!)

[btmura]

Thanks for the clarification, CiaranG.

I'm planning to make a rbb-foss fork that removes the YouTube JAR and the code that depended on it. In other words, it will have the old behavior of just going to the YouTube page in this FOSS edition.

Other approaches involve broadcasting an intent to allow the user to choose the YouTube app, but I don't think showing an intent popup each time is a good user experience. Another idea could be to write some sort of separate YouTube player plugin available on Play store that when present allows rbb to show YouTube videos within the app. However, it's probably not a good idea to expect the user to download 2 things. The separate branch is the easiest thing, so I'll take a look at that in a week or two.

If you have a more concrete idea of a workaround, please feel free to let me know.

[tetris4]

Thanks for responding so fast and in a positive manner btmura, will be expecting the update in f-droid! =)

PS: I enabled syncing and it works now, thnx.

[btmura]

I created a new branch in this github project called "foss".

I committed the above patch that removes the YouTube blob to this new branch and tagged it as 3.0-foss.

Each release I'll create two tags like 3.1 and 3.1-foss.