Hi ! It’s been a while since I don’t use the Signal app, and instead I use Molly from the Mully-FOSS custom f-droid repo:

https://molly.im/fdroid https://molly.im/fdroid/foss/fdroid/repo

So I can use molly without binary blobs… However I was wondering if there were any efforts to include molly into the f-droid official repos… I understand the motto of having custom repos, but the more custom repos added, the slower the repos updates… And molly doesn’t get updated everyday either, :)

Thanks !

  • Ephera
    10•3 years ago

    It’s a bit of a touchy subject, because Signal does not tolerate forks or third-party builds using their servers, see for example here: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217211165
    (moxie0, a.k.a. Moxie Marlinspike, is the initiator of Signal.)

    The F-Droid team has therefore decided to refrain from the inclusion of the official Signal app: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues/238

    And Molly kind of doesn’t resolve that issue, as it does connect to the Signal servers.
    I guess, maybe the F-Droid team wouldn’t care so much, since the Molly dev would serve as the upstream dev and can help to resolve issues with packaging, but yeah, I don’t know.

    I guess, you could open a Request For Packaging and see what they say: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp

    • Jack
      4•3 years ago

      Jeez, that statement on federated services is pretty disappointing. Wasn’t Matrix already going around the time of that conversation?

      • Ephera
        3•3 years ago

        It was, yeah. They even mention XMPP in that conversation, which works fine, too.

        And I found that exchange deeply disappointing as a whole.
        If you don’t want to federate with other servers, nor accept third-party builds/forks on your servers, then there’s no real difference to WhatsApp et al.

        We can try to decompile their builds to see what code they actually ship, but if they do actually include questionable code, there’s little we can do.

    • @adrianmalacoda@lemmy.ml
      2•3 years ago

      Yeah its really weird, apparently F-Droid’s requirement to get the author’s consent to publish an app also applies to forks. So, the only way a Signal-compatible app would be eligible to be on F-Droid is if it were not a fork, and I’m not sure how much reuse (e.g. from libsignal) is permitted or if it would have to be a clean-room reimplementation (despite Signal and libsignal being free software).

        • Ephera
          4•3 years ago

          They have builds of Firefox itself (the “Fennec” app on F-Droid), so I don’t think this applies to Mull.

          As I understand, they also mostly care about having someone that helps fix build issues, which can be done by a fork.
          It’s just that if a dev has specifically wished to not be distributed on F-Droid, there’s not much of a point in not respecting that, because the dev can break the build process, if they care to, or just stop developing the app as open-source.

          • @je_vv@lemmy.mlOP
            2•3 years ago

            Well, that was sort of my point. Both mull and fennec are forks, they are not Mozilla owned/maintained apps. And I have no clue if Mozilla approves or even if it cares about having fennec and mull on f-droid. Most likely they don’t care, since they don’t have Firefox for Android on f-droid, :(

            But I got that signal guys have expressed in the past, they didn’t like forks, at least they did so for the famous libreSignal fork. So I understand devs/maintainers might become more cautious about including any signal fork on any repo. However I haven’t seen any complaint from signal on the molly github repo, as there were on the libreSignal one, so I was hopeful, :)

            Thanks !

            • @adrianmalacoda@lemmy.ml
              3•3 years ago

              Mozilla has helped F-Droid package Fennec before, so they are definitely willing to have it available. I assume the reason why the official Firefox is not on there is because they do not want third party builds labelled Firefox, which is a position they’ve taken in the past e.g. with Debian.

              With Signal, I think they realize they can’t realistically demand that forks not exist. Moxie may “prefer” that forks not use his servers but Signal is free software and he can’t legally block them from doing so. The only possible avenue of attack they had vs LibreSignal was their use of the word Signal, which no other Signal fork uses (langis, molly, noise, etc). F-Droid is completely legally allowed to build and publish Molly, they simply choose not to out of respect for Signal.

              • Ephera
                1•3 years ago

                they do not want third party builds labelled Firefox, which is a position they’ve taken in the past e.g. with Debian.

                Well, Debian is special, because they do quite a lot of patching and even keep old Firefox releases alive that Mozilla does not support anymore.
                Other Linux distros do still ship Firefox as “Firefox” and haven’t gotten complaints.

                But yeah, the F-Droid team might’ve been precautious for that reason.