Browser-Android-Tabs Repo Missing

Misc
#1

What happened to the repo on this page: https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs

It had instructions on how to set up a build environment and then yesterday it was gone. Any idea on what happened or when it will be back up?

#2

@trand1,
That’s because we’ve recently shifted our Android code base to use the same as our core browser. You can find Android issues by going to the brave-browser repo and viewing issues under the Android label.

Which wiki article were you looking for specifically?

#3

It was this link that I was trying to access, but it now gives a 404 error

brave-screenshot
brave-screenshot1920Ă—969 96.6 KB

It had some great documentation on how to setup a build enviornment and how to create an APK.

#4

@trand1,
Got it – apologies for the confusion. As I said before, since we’re moving around our documentation and repos due to the migration of Android to core code (mentioned above), some repositories have been made private and will eventually be removed, which is why you’re unable to access the android-tabs repository.

However, I do happen to have access to all the docs in it still – give me a bit of time and I’ll pull the docs from the repository today and post them here on Community and/or on our Help Center so you and other users can still easily access them.

1 Like
#5

@trand1,
Actually, in the interim, I believe the information you’re looking for can be found on the brave-browser repository now – https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki#clone-and-initialize-the-repo

#6

@Mattches
I’d like to ask you to reconsider this decision of making the android-tabs repository unavailable publicly and completely removing it in the future. There are a few reasons for this:

  1. Some information is still relevant. While I’m sure there are a lot of things that are practically useless now, this is definitely not true for everything. Some issues contained discussion that will still be relevant for the new version; as an example, issue 92 on the android-tabs repository contained discussion about inclusion of Brave in F-Droid, and some of that may still matter for a potential future inclusion of the new browser. Other issues or the wiki may contain information useful to developers of other Android apps facing similar challenges as Brave’s devs did. I can’t really confirm any of this of course since the repository is currently inaccessible.
  2. History and archival. Many early versions of old softwares are difficult to find nowadays, including browsers. There are people who have invested significant amount of time to compile collections of the Netscape browser, for example, yet they will probably always remain incomplete. Lesser known browsers, and in particular early versions of them when they were only known to a handful of people, are practically impossible to find sometimes. Not to mention the documentation, source code attribution, contemporary discussion, etc.
  3. Links elsewhere on the web. The issue 92 mentioned above is linked from several other sites and appears in search engines, and all those links are now broken. Reading “Check out this issue for a detailed discussion about X” and then being greeted by a dead link is incredibly frustrating.
  4. Community appreciation. I have never contributed to Brave, but if I had, I know I would be very sad to see my issues, pull requests, and code changes vanish into /dev/null. While the commits would still live on in forks and personal backups, this is almost never true for e.g. issues and pull requests since those are much trickier to get full copies of.

GitHub lets you archive a repository, which keeps the code, history, documentation (wiki), and community interaction accessible in read-only mode while marking it clearly as unmaintained (here’s an example of an archive repo). This is what I would suggest for the android-tabs repository (and any others you may have retired or will in the future). If you still want to take it down entirely, I’d like to ask you to temporarily restore it so it can be archived for future reference into the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. I’m part of the ArchiveTeam and would happily do the actual archival of this.

Edit since apparently closing this discussion is an appropriate thing to do:

  • I still don’t know where to find the issues. They’re definitely not in the brave-core repository as that repo does not have any issues – issues are disabled there. For example, where’s the F-Droid issue I mentioned? I found a few, but not the main one I referenced. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg as there were thousands of issues and PRs.
  • You say that “some of them have been closed out or marked wont-fix , and will not appear in the new repo”, but also “these issues are not gone”. That can’t be true at the same time. At least some of the issues are gone according to the former.
  • Most of the points in my post were not addressed at all.
  • Why did you feel the need to close the topic?

This shows pretty clearly what your stance towards the community helping develop your software is. That’s a shame, and I expected better.

1 Like
#7

@JustAnotherArchivist,
Once again, these issues are not gone – they’ve just moved to the brave-core repository. Some of them have been closed out or marked wont-fix, and will not appear in the new repo – but the rest of them will.

Thank you for your feedback.

#8