Get real author name for F-Droid about obtainium

[cvoges12]

@ImranR98 How do other F-Droid apps get the Author name and other metadata then? I'm almost certain they don't use webscraping for this.

[ImranR98]

The f-droid API doesn't return any author name. For example: https://f-droid.org/api/v1/packages/de.schildbach.wallet

So the only way to get this would be through web scraping which isn't worth it because it's error prone and would require a second web request

[foxjaw]

I would not think web scraping would be error prone. But it's upto you to implement it or not.
For ex, take droidify
view-source:https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.looker.droidify/
Line 178 is just a plane one liner, which would be easy to scrape to.

I believe this is crucial for me. Caz the applist showing author would be much more beautiful & convenient information to look into.

[ImranR98]

Web scraping in general is unreliable because you will not be notified or warned of website changes. APIs are meant to be used programmatically so they are always going to be the same - whenever changes do need to be made, those changes will be made in a new version of the API, while the old version will continue to work or you will be given a warning in advance before it stops working.

[foxjaw]

Oh. I'm not a dev but, is this the documentation for it ?

[ImranR98]

No that's not the API documentation. That is the documentation for the file that developers are supposed to provide to F-droid when they submit their apps.

[ImranR98]

@cvoges12 no idea

[foxjaw]

@cvoges12 That's a point btw. I use droidify & can confirm. Follow up here:
https://github.com/orgs/Droid-ify/discussions/584
Here's the Index provided by F-Droid:
https://fdroid.org/repo/index-v1.json

[cvoges12]

Yeah, it isn't impossible. I see AuroraDroid and such doing this too. I guess the answer to how to do this is just less obvious. But I don't think that's a good reason to close the issue since that doesn't necessarily make the issue impossible. I could go ask the AuroraDroid devs or whatever if need be.

[cvoges12]

@ImranR98 What do you think?

[ImranR98]

Sure, hopefully there's some other API w more info

[foxjaw]

@ImranR98 Try https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/raw/master/metadata/<app-id>.yml
For example, https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/raw/master/metadata/com.stoutner.privacybrowser.standard.yml
The Author is Soren Stoutner.

Read more here

[jollySleeper]

@foxjaw I just created a Issue somewhat Related to this #1138

This discovery of yours could be great for automating tracking packages from source repos

[ImranR98]

https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium/releases/tag/v0.14.38-beta

[foxjaw]

Tqvm. Now fdroid trackers look like how they supposed to be ! With their authors.
Although, couple apps still miss AuthorName as it seems that gitlab yml metadata file has it missing too
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/raw/master/metadata/com.termux.yml
For the above app, you can check the source code metadata from the yml file & retrieve the AuthorName which is a github organization (termux).

And 3rd party F-Droid repos usually don't provide this metadata anyways.

[jollySleeper]

Thanks @ImranR98 for this feature.

As far as I know this API will help in fetching the source repo too. So, can you add the source repo link for the particular app in App Detail Section of Obtanium