Amazefilemanager: Saw that you updated Amaze twice, but F-Droid hasn't been updated

[YamiYukiSenpai]

Are you planning on releasing hotfixes on F-Droid?

[ghost]

This. Why is the F-Droid version so behind in updates?

F-Droid version: 3.3.2

Play Store version: 3.3.4.79

[NishaYume]

Hello want to know when will be updated the F-Droid version too.

[EmmanuelMess]

It should be automatically updated...

[flocke]

The newest F-Droid builds fail because they detect cloudrail in the build.gradle file. Which is strange, I believe it has been there before as well...

[ravilov]

Perhaps cloudrail has been blacklisted by F-Droid in the meantime?
I too am looking forward to this getting resolved.
For reference, here's a link to the latest fdroid build log:
https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/com.amaze.filemanager/lastbuild

[VishalNehra]

Opened an issue with fdroid, hope they give a solution to this.

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/issues/1817

[ClockGen]

@VishalNehra Cloudrail was indeed blacklisted since the last amaze update. https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver/commit/b3754af137761b6cd427601a9131ea033199c4d4
The library itself was discontinued though, and cloudrail now focuses on something completely different (I dont know if cloudrail blacklist is connected to this or not).
As per F-Droid's policy, all libraries should be open source too, and if it was included before it was probably overlooked, or the library wasn't proprietary.

Is it possible to remove cloudrail for f-droid build flavor?

[EmmanuelMess]

Is it possible to remove cloudrail for f-droid build flavor?

I think we need it to connect to the cloud.

[licaon-kter]

CloudRail now entirely focuses on connecting industrial sensors to AWS, Azure, Google IoT and many more to realize IIoT projects.

@EmmanuelMess ...I don't see an issue with a F-Droid version that can't handle clouds.

[ravilov]

I personally barely use cloud storage at all, none of which through Amaze, so I don't think I'd care too much if the functionality was gone from the F-Droid build. :)

Alternatively, we could try and find a free replacement lib with the same or similar functionality. I'm sure there's at least _something_ out there.

[EmmanuelMess]

Maybe we should create our own fork, instead of adding more differences between the Play and FDroid versions.

Edit: Where is the cloudrail source?

[licaon-kter]

Edit: Where is the cloudrail source?

Nice try, from what I see it wasn't a FOSS thing so no joy.

Yes, F-Droid trusted that maven repo to include only FOSS libs but that's was not an actual requirement.

[andersonvom]

Not sure if it's related, but fdroid is warning about the source code not being available:

This app has features you may not like: NoSourceSince

[licaon-kter]

@andersonvom yes, related, there's no source that F-Droid can build from only FOSS components (this source and its dependencies)

[EmmanuelMess]

Update: last release on FDroid is now 3.1.2 RC1 (2yrs old, and there were 4 release candidates for that version).

[532910]

Switched to https://github.com/zhanghai/MaterialFiles
Unsubscribing

[keunes]

@EmmanuelMess ...I don't see an issue with a F-Droid version that can't handle clouds. [@licaon-kter]

I must say I second this. AntennaPod (which I'm active for) also had disabled one feature as a library was not FOSS. I'd rather have Amaze in the default F-Droid repository without cloud support than not have Amaze at all (I don't care for cloud support as I don't use it).

Maybe we should create our own fork, instead of adding more differences between the Play and FDroid versions.

Is an option indeed, but it might not be great for discoverability for potential new users.

[hman2]

Is it possible to remove cloudrail for f-droid build flavor?

I think we need it to connect to the cloud.

To _which_ cloud?

Cloud support per se does not have to mean you have to get proprietary, as there are open source cloud implementations, Own Cloud for instance.

If this library is just used to access one specific, proprietary cloud, could this feature be separated into a plug-in that than will get "blacklisted" on F-Droid, but still available on the Play Store? I guess the entire cloud software accessed here is not avaible on F-Droid, so it would do no harm to separate its access into a plugin...

If it is just to have a cloud option for Amaze users, then I guess Own Cloud might be sufficient...

Also, I just followed the thread about WHY Amaze got blacklisted, because it uses CloudRail. There I found that CloudRail is also discontinued! I would say that for security reasons Amaze should NOT rely on cloud code that does not get security updates. That could become a security threat in the future. And if the proprietary cloud that should have been accessed by Amaze happens to be Dropbox, in this discussion there is mention of an open source SDK for Dropbox.

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/issues/1817
https://github.com/dropbox/dropbox-sdk-java

Update: About the CloudRail Universal API:
https://developers.cloudrail.com/universal-api/
"This product has been discontinued as of March 1st 2019."

[mihawk90]

F-Droid version: 3.3.2

Maybe I'm blind but I'm not even seeing that... On the website the last version seems to be from 2017:

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.amaze.filemanager/

Hence why it also has the NoSourceSince Anti-Feature

[licaon-kter]

@mihawk90 Yes, we went back to the last version that was entirely FOSS, is that old? Maybe...

[mihawk90]

Ah well, must have overlooked that above. Thanks

[VishalNehra]

Cloudrail indeed is outdated, but the APIs seem to be working fine till now. And the plugin is generating revenue for us. Creating a separate flavour for fdroid will require lots of codebase changes, basically a copy of each and every file. It's simply not worth it.
As for using only open source cloud services sdk, we do not currently have any time/resources to work on the same.

[keunes]

I don't know anything about coding, but gradle flavours seemed to be the solution for a similar (free/non-free/F-drod) issue with AntennaPod: https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod/issues/1959 Maybe that could be a solution for Amaze as well (?)

[wuniversales]

Why not create an AmazeFileManager repository for fdroid?

[VishalNehra]

@keunes we've been using gradle flavours in past (G+ profile picture for nav bar feature), but in this scenario, we'll have to practically maintain identical file for almost whole source code in fdroid flavour. Would be very difficult to maintain.

[TakuyaSama]

Hi,

I've been reading a little bit about all this thing and i would like to know what's going to happen, i jut got tired to have the old Amaze File Manager 3.1.2 RC1 (the latest version available on F-Droid, which is almost 3 years old), and i just installed the latest version today (3.4.1) because i couldn't even install the APKs from Amaze, really limited options, etc.

I read (if i remember correctly at the GitLab discussion/issue dedicated to this), that the Amaze File Manager developer team would be developing a home made implementation of the cloud library that's causing all the mess (i suppose that would be FOSS, of course), and if i could know what about the status of it.

Thank you very much for your great efforts and work, i really love this fantastic app, to me (excepting for the limited to pay version cloud features), the best file manager (FOSS) for Android by far.

Bests ^^.

[VishalNehra]

@TakuyaSama yes it's currently being developed. Last I heard from @EmmanuelMess Onedrive was done (except upload). You can join our Telegram channel to stay updated
https://t.me/joinchat/NNFgWxQUB8fFE3yCsC0w4g

[vdbhb59]

So basically, what I see is, Amaze is leaving things out and not going for FOSS fully? Find it very hard to digest as well tbvh.

[EmmanuelMess]

So basically, what I see is, Amaze is leaving things out and not going for FOSS fully? Find it very hard to digest as well tbvh.

We are working on creating a library for cloud connection, until it is done, no new FOSS version will be available.

[IPv777]

Why not create an AmazeFileManager repository for fdroid?

Yes, or on IzzyDroid : https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/ https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/info

[VishalNehra]

Why not create an AmazeFileManager repository for fdroid?

Yes, or on IzzyDroid : https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/ https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/info

Alright, I've mailed the guy. Let's wait for his response.

[VishalNehra]

Here you go guys!
https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.amaze.filemanager

Apparently author already knew about Amaze, didn't take much time to include us there (:
That said, let's keep this issue open so that we can solve the actual problem and get Amaze back on Fdroid.

[IPv777]

Perfect :D Thanks ;)

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-------- Original Message --------
On Jul 13, 2020, 22:22, Vishal Nehra < [email protected]> wrote:

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Here you go guys!
https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.amaze.filemanager

Apparently author already knew about Amaze, didn't take much time to include us there (:
That said, let's keep this issue open so that we can solve the actual problem and get Amaze back on Fdroid.

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[keunes]

We are working on creating a library for cloud connection, until it is done, no new FOSS version will be available. (@EmmanuelMess)

Can we follow this work somewhere? :)