Switch to Gradle/Android Studio

[mvdan]

You should get rid of all the jars. We are trying to get all the apps on F-Droid to be built entirely from source, but it's hard to do - if not impossible - if people use jars.

The easiest for you to do would be to use Gradle, and then pull your dependencies from maven central. Please don't use other maven repos - pulling binaries from random places can be hard to check.

One last thing - once you have removed all the jars from the repo, could you use gradle to make a flavour without GCM? We stripped GCM off Telegram for it to be included on F-Droid since it's an indirect non-free dependency, so the same policy applies to Kontalk. The current builds on F-Droid include GCM, but that should change :)

[daniele-athome]

Hi Daniel. You are absolutely right. Including jars was a temporary (read: lazy) solution during the alpha stage (although 2.x series also included jars :P).
Anyway we should switch to Gradle soon (I can't give you an estimated delivery date yet, sorry).
I'd like to deploy Kontalk 3.0 on F-Droid during the beta stage, so Gradle support should be ready for the first beta release. Of course patches are very welcome :-)
I will use this issue to keep track of the related changes.

[daniele-athome]

@mvdan do you think that removing gcm completely is a good move? I mean someone could have both F-Droid and Google Play installed (I do :-]), still he/she might want to use a source-certified version (except for the gcm dependency part of course).
I will look into making a flavour anyway, it's an important modification. At a first glance, I see that I'll have to duplicate the manifest too. Is it really necessary?

[mvdan]

Well, GCM is free software from the client side, so technically speaking we can include it. But it will get the NonFreeDep or NonFreeNet antifeatures, since the app depends in some way on a non-free network/service. I don't know whether GCM has to work for kontalk to work, but that doesn't change much.

From our point of view, it would be best if you made a flavour without GCM and we'd build that. The other option is to build with GCM and an antifeature.

[daniele-athome]

GCM is not strictly needed - manual polling would take its place if Google Play was not found. I guess having an antifeature would make users reluctant to install it. I will make a flavour for the first beta release.

What do you think about adding something like a "NonFreeOptionalDep" antifeature? A non-free optional dependency, like in this case. Kontalk needs GCM, but it can work without it.

[daniele-athome]

This is done. I will track the non-Google flavour creation on issue #181.