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bgclock/RELEASING.md
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hansdezwartandClaude Opus 5 ec1a65c89c Reset by holding the button, not by tapping it twice
A test user found the reset button, tapped it once and gave up. That is what
the old feedback invited: a first tap brightened the icon and started a ring
draining over 2s, and a draining ring reads as "wait" or "loading", not "press
me again". The one thing that would have said otherwise — a word — is not
available here, because the bar is shared by two players sitting opposite each
other and every word in this app lives inside a panel that rotates to face one
of them.

"Tap this twice" has no wordless vocabulary. "Keep holding" has a very
well-worn one, so reset is now a 975ms hold: a dim track ring appears whole the
moment the finger lands, a bright arc fills over it from 12 o'clock, and
letting go early makes the arc retreat. The retreat is the instruction. A stray
hold is also far less likely than two stray taps inside 2s, so the live game
this was guarding is guarded better than before.

Three things that look incidental and are not:

- Hiding the ring is an opacity that waits out the retreat, not display:none,
  which cut the retreat off at the instant of release — invisible, and it was
  the whole point. The fade has a real duration because a 0s transition with a
  delay may be treated as no transition at all, taking the delay with it.
- width:auto on the ring: .btn svg sets a width for the bar icons, and
  inheriting it against the ring's new height draws an ellipse.
- The ring's transition is exempted from the blanket prefers-reduced-motion
  rule. Collapsing it would fill the ring the instant you touched the button
  and claim the reset was done 975ms before it was. It reports state.

Keyboard, switch and assistive activation cannot hold, and hold-only would have
left those users unable to reset at all, one release after an accessibility
pass. Clicks arriving with detail 0 — no pointer behind them — keep the old
two-presses-within-2s and the draining ring.

Success now sounds: the flag's falling triad, rising instead. Deliberately not
another rising fifth, which sndSwap owns and plays on every handover.

Also corrects a claim in RELEASING.md: the screenshots reproduce near-exactly,
not exactly. Two runs of identical code differ by a 4x13 pixel sliver where the
delay bar's fill edge lands mid-pixel, so a non-empty git diff after re-running
proves nothing on its own.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-15 14:51:06 +02:00

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# Releasing a new version
The clock lives in two places: the web app in `public_html/`, which you host
yourself, and the Android app on F-Droid, which is built from a git tag.
**Everything F-Droid needs comes from a tag in this repository.** After the first
release was accepted there is nothing to do in F-Droid's own repo — their bot
watches the tags here and writes the build entry itself. Don't open a merge
request against `fdroiddata` for a new version.
Worked example below bumps 1.0 to 1.1. Substitute your own numbers.
## 1. Make the change
Both versions share one copy of the app. Edit `public_html/index.html` and the
Android build picks it up automatically — the Gradle build reads `public_html/`
directly rather than keeping a second copy, so the two can't drift.
If you changed anything visible, bump the service worker cache or installed web
users will keep the old page:
```
# public_html/sw.js
const CACHE = "bgclock-v18"; # any new value; it only has to differ
```
## 2. Bump the version
In `android/app/build.gradle.kts`:
```kotlin
versionCode = 2 // an integer, +1 every release, never reused
versionName = "1.1" // what people see
```
`versionCode` is what Android uses to decide one version is newer than another.
It must go up every single release, even for a one-character fix.
## 3. Write the changelog
A new file named after the **versionCode**, not the version name:
```
fastlane/metadata/android/en-US/changelogs/2.txt
```
Maximum 500 characters. This is what shows up in F-Droid's "What's New".
## 4. Build it and put it on your phone
```bash
export ANDROID_HOME="$HOME/Android/Sdk" # already in ~/.bashrc
cd android
./gradlew assembleDebug
adb install -r app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk
./gradlew --stop # the daemon holds ~500 MB otherwise
```
Play a real game before tagging. Worth checking specifically: start a match,
make some moves, force-quit from the task switcher and reopen — everything
should come back, paused. That is the check that proves the app's storage is
working, and it fails silently rather than loudly.
## 5. Commit, tag, push
```bash
git add -A
git commit -m "…"
git tag -a v1.1 -m "Backgammon Clock 1.1"
git push
git push origin v1.1
```
Keep tags in the `v1.1` shape for consistency, but nothing depends on it:
`UpdateCheckMode: Tags` with no pattern matches every tag whatever it's called,
and F-Droid's bot resolves whichever tag it finds to a commit hash before it
writes the build entry.
Never move or delete a tag that has been pushed — F-Droid may already have built
it. If a release is wrong, bump the version and release again. (The recipe pins
a hash, so a moved tag can't retroactively change a version they already built;
it would just leave your repo disagreeing with what's on people's phones.)
**If you ever write a build entry by hand**, its `commit:` must be a full 40-char
commit hash — never a tag, never a branch. Tags are mutable, so a tag there means
the thing F-Droid builds and signs can change under them, and they reject it on
sight. This came up on the very first submission and is easy to get wrong,
because `fdroid lint` doesn't check it under `UpdateCheckMode: Tags` — the
pipeline goes green and a human catches it days later. Get the hash with:
```bash
git rev-parse v1.1^{commit} # ^{commit}, or an annotated tag gives you the
# tag object's hash instead of the commit's
```
This doesn't come up in a normal release: the bot writes the entry, and the bot
writes hashes.
## 6. Wait
Their bot notices the new tag, adds a build entry, and the build server picks it
up on its next cycle. Expect a day or two. Nothing to do.
## Deploying the web version
Separate from all of the above, and manual: upload the six files in
`public_html/``index.html`, `manifest.webmanifest`, `sw.js`, `icon-192.png`,
`icon-512.png`, `icon-maskable-512.png` — to the web host. `README.md` and
`RELEASING.md` stay out of it; they live in the repo root for that reason.
## If the screenshots need redoing
```bash
python3 tools/screenshots.py
```
That rewrites all five in
`fastlane/metadata/android/en-US/images/phoneScreenshots/` at 1170×2532. They
are rendered from `public_html/index.html` with headless Chromium rather than
taken on a phone, so anything that changes the look of the app is a reason to
re-run it.
**Near-exact, not exact.** Two runs of identical code differ by a few bytes in
shots 1 and 4: a 4×13 pixel sliver at the delay bar's fill edge, where the
`scaleX` boundary lands mid-pixel and the rasteriser rounds it differently from
one run to the next. Max channel difference 11, invisible. So a `git diff` after
re-running is not evidence that anything changed — compare the pixels before
believing it, and `git checkout` the files back if that sliver is all it is.
The script sets each scene by seeding `localStorage` before the app boots, so
the app renders its own saved state rather than having the DOM poked from
outside. Editing a scene means editing the `SCENES` table at the top.
Three traps, all of which fail quietly, and all of which the script already
handles — they are written down here because they cost an afternoon each:
- The capture lands whenever the virtual-time budget runs out, not when your
script finishes — so freeze the render loop (`requestAnimationFrame = () => 0`)
once the frame you want is on screen.
- CSS transitions don't advance under `--virtual-time-budget`, so a panel caught
mid-transition photographs in its *old* colour. Disable transitions in the
screenshot build.
- Snap-confined Chromium cannot write into hidden directories — not `~/.cache`,
not any dot-directory, not the private `/tmp` it is handed. It fails with a
bare "Permission denied" and no hint as to why. Both the HTML it reads and the
PNG it writes have to sit in a plainly-named directory.
## Reference
- App ID: `nl.hansdezwart.bgclock` — fixed forever; changing it makes a new app.
- F-Droid listing text: `fastlane/metadata/android/en-US/` (title ≤50 chars,
summary ≤80, description ≤4000, changelog ≤500). Only these HTML tags work in
the description: `b big blockquote br cite em i li ol small strike strong sub
sup tt u ul`.
- The original submission: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/45478
- F-Droid signs the APK with their key, not yours. Reproducible builds were
declined at submission and can't be enabled later for this app ID.