Re: The Android port and the Emacs web page

[Po Lu]

Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:

> Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:
>
>> Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:
>>
>>> The user can uninstall the application and then install whatever version
>>> he wishes, right?
>>
>> Not without losing all of his data...
>
> I'm not using Emacs on Android, but surely the user can backup and
> restore the data.

This is cumbrous process, and completing it properly requires superuser
access to your device--easier said than done on Android.

> No if that prevents distribution by the most popular Free Software
> package manager for Android.

That's why we are trying to arrive at a solution which satisfies both of
us.

> Is it reasonable to expect that the package manager adapts its scripts
> to Emacs' special case? F-Droid using versionCode for detecting new
> releases is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, as versionCode is what
> the developer is expected to bump to signal that.

Emacs is already a very special case (as against other F-Droid
programs), because it defines its metadata in a bare XML template,
rather than a Gradle configuration file, and configures itself rather
with the Autoconf build system than with Gradle or Maven, which F-Droid
expects.