simplauncher/DEVELOPMENT.md

Developing Unlauncher

Building a release

Building an Unlauncher release is straightforward.

1. Push a tag to GitHub (e.g. 1.2.1) from the latest commit on the master branch
   1. Make sure that the versionName in the build.gradle.kts matches the tag that you are pushing
2. Add release notes to the draft Release on GitHub that was created by the CI and publish the release
3. Prepare for the next release by incrementing the versionCode and versionName in the build.gradle.kts file
4. Monitor the F-Droid build status to make sure the tag is successfully published (can take several days depending on the build queue)

Building a beta release

A beta release should be published ahead of an official release any time there are major changes to the app or the build process.

Unfortunately, F-Droid does not have an automatic process for triggering "beta" releases like it does for normal automatic updates yet. However, an F-Droid user will only be prompted to upgrade an app (or have the app be auto-upgraded) if their locally installed app has a version/code that is less than the CurrenVersion/CurrentVersionCode defined in the fdroiddata yml config file.

So, creating a beta release for Unlauncher requires the following steps:

1. Push a beta tag to GitHub (e.g. 2.0.0-beta.1)
   1. Make sure that the versionName in the build.gradle.kts matches the tag that you are pushing
2. Delete the draft Release on GitHub for the beta tag that was created by the CI
3. Raise a MR to fdroid/fdroiddata to add a new Builds entry for the beta release
   1. Do not update the configured CurrenVersion/CurrentVersionCode since that will trigger a normal release
4. Prepare for the next release by incrementing the versionCode and versionName in the build.gradle.kts file

Checking F-Droid build status

The status for the latest Unlauncher F-Droid build can be found here.

A list of all recent F-Droid builds can be found here.