hansdezwartandClaude Opus 5
404fdb5538
F-Droid's reviewer measured the score and move lines at 2.1:1 against the 4.5:1 normal text needs. Raising them past 14pt bold puts them under the 3:1 large-text bar instead, which is the only way ink still readable as "muted" can be conformant on a mid-tone accent: reaching 4.5:1 at the old size would have taken near-black labels on plum and slate, out-shouting the clock digits above them. Hence the 19px floor, with a comment saying so — lowering it breaks the contrast claim silently. Measuring turned up a second failure nobody had flagged: the active player's clock digits are white on the accent, and brass sat at 2.46:1 against the same 3:1 bar. Sage and brass are darkened just far enough to clear it, scaled in linear light so only lightness moves. Slate, teal and plum already passed and are untouched. Darkening further was tempting and wrong — it would have taken the headroom the muted labels need. --accent-mute was doing double duty as the delay bar's background, where it only ever agreed with the bar by accident. Splitting off --track keeps the bar pixel-identical: 234px wide, fill and unfilled segments unchanged. The delay number is right-aligned in a box exactly two digits wide. The bar and the number together now sit within a pixel of the panel's centre rather than 10px left of it, and the digit that changes every second stays put instead of sliding when the count drops out of double figures; the gap absorbs it. The settings sheet's Done button and preset chips are still white on accent at 15px, which needs 4.5:1 and gets 3.2:1. Known, and left alone: fixing them means 19px floors and visibly taller buttons. Screenshots come from tools/screenshots.py now instead of being made by hand. It seeds localStorage and lets the app render its own saved state, so scenes are reproducible. The traps are in its docstring and RELEASING.md — including one that cost an afternoon today: snap-confined Chromium cannot write into any hidden directory, and says only "Permission denied". Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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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:
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
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
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:
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
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, not taken on
a phone, so they reproduce exactly — anything that changes the look of the app
is a reason to re-run it.
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/tmpit 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.