Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one

I work on #FDroid because I believe in #FreeSoftware. One of the hardest things about working on a project like F-Droid is when someone decides to publicly campaign against our work, and its only loosely based on fact. We get a constant stream of inquiries from people who just found out, asking the same questions again. Now I understand why companies hire PR staff. Communications can require a ton of work and stress. And when a project is mostly volunteers, no one is keen to take on that stress

"The most fashionable american dolphin wearing a ball gown" - generated by Stable Diffusion AI

@Aurimas I'd like to help improve the verification support in Android Studio. How would you recommend I engage? I've had mixed results submitting things to official Android channels, mostly I get silence, so I'd like to know if there is a channel where you think my feedback, testing and experiences would be heard.

Putin constantly talks about fighting fascists because he specifically aims to dehumanize. He can say everyone Russia kills was a fascist, and people buy it. And so many people call protestors Antifa to dehumanize them, so they can justify treating them badly. And I heard too often from friends, things like "I don't advocate violence, but he's a fascist so he deserves it".

I'm pretty sick of the obsession with #antifa / #fascist. It really is a counterproductive debate. There basically are no actual Fascists these days, current political parties are organized differently, and the people who are actually part of Antifa groups have always been small isolated groups. The words have become meaningless and dangerous, like just "person who I think is bad". Using the terms dehumanizes the situation and makes political solutions much harder.

now this is interesting, Meta is claiming to have busted a #US Military social media #disinfo campaign: https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/metas-adversarial-threat-report-q3-2022/

Now that I'm focused on #FDroid client development, I have lots of time to toot because Gradle/Android builds take so damn long as compared to Python. 😂 😭

I guess the tricky part there is that those stub classes need to be named the same as the proprietary dependencies, including the gradle lines. I wonder if it would make sense to have a #Maven repo that parallels Maven Central and maven.google.com that just contains stub libraries with the same Maven coordinates as the proprietary libs that many projects depend on.

#Gradle and #Java both operate by loading all dependencies and classes that are used in a project, unlike C or C++, which can #ifdef them out. This makes #FreeSoftware a bit harder when touching proprietary libraries, since all dependencies must be present at build time. If a build requires proprietary blobs, the resulting binaries cannot be free software. One workaround is to make free stub classes in build flavors to replace the proprietary build dependencies when building.

After years of being one of the few to keep pushing dependency verification and even #PGP signatures on binaries, while getting responses like "gpg in 2022? wtf?", it is gratifying to see that not only has #Gradle full adopted this workflow, but also #Android developers at Google:

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/support/+/HEAD/gradle/verification-keyring.keys