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Replicant 6.0 Is In Progress; F-Droid App-Listing Issue

Accepted submission by -- OriginalOwner_ http://tinyurl.com/OriginalOwner at 2016-09-01 01:01:50
OS

from the i'm-not-dead-yet dept.

Replicant (AKA The Little Red Robot) is an Android-based OS whose mission is to stick to the Free Software Foundation's guidelines more closely than its parent project.

The Replicant OS project reports [replicant.us]

At Replicant, things are moving again: Replicant is being updated from Android 4.2 to Android 6.0 by Wolfgang Wiedmeyer. The status and feedback takes place in the forums [replicant.us] before it is reviewed and integrated [into] the official Replicant repositories. This work is currently being done for the Galaxy S 3 (I9300).

[...]Wolfgang Wiedmeyer is also working on [...] Graphics acceleration [...] Building the toolchains [...]full device encryption and SELinux support.

Future directions: [...] support the upstream Linux kernel for devices with a minimal amount of effort [...] support upstream bootloaders, such as U-Boot.

[...]Helping Replicant by contributing to F-Droid

Replicant is supported [by and] recommended by the FSF and listed as a fully free software distribution that respects the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines.

[...]F-droid is committed to distributing only free software, and it does. However, some [F-Droid apps promote non-FOSS sortware and/or depend on non-FOSS software and do] not comply with the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines.

While the list of such anti-features is displayed in red when selecting an application in F-Droid, applications with anti-features are still listed aside compliant ones. This is also quite confusing since free software isn't expected to contain such anti-features in the first place.

[...]The anti-feature display is confusing and [...] there was no clear smoking gun.

[...]If you're interested to jump-in and help resolve this issue, please get in touch with us or with F-Droid developers directly to get directions on how to get started.


Original Submission