hansdezwartandClaude Opus 5
3a7eb8c612
A force-quit deep into a turn came back at the clock's last-turn-switch value, losing the whole interrupted turn. The tell was the delay counter returning at a full 12: the newest saved state was the one tap() writes, and tap() sets turnAt and calls saveGame() in the same breath, so it carries held ~ 0. Restoring it reproduces the moment of the turn switch exactly. The two triggers meant to save at quit time — visibilitychange and pagehide — do not fire in Android's WebView. MainActivity's onPause() forwards to web.onPause() under a comment claiming that is what makes visibilitychange fire. It isn't: document visibility follows the WebView's view and window visibility, not that call. The forwarding is still right for stopping timers and audio, but the saved match should never have depended on it. This is not new. It has almost certainly been broken since 1.0, and the release check could not catch it, because for the first 12 seconds of a turn the delay absorbs everything and render() never touches st.reserve. A clock that has lost its place is indistinguishable from one that is correctly sitting still, so every force-quit test that quit soon after a turn change passed. RELEASING.md now says to let the turn run 40 seconds first, which is the only version of that check worth running. So the page stops waiting to be told. A timer writes the match once a second while a clock is running — a timer rather than a hook in loop(), because requestAnimationFrame stops when the page is hidden, which is exactly when this matters. blur joins the listeners too: a different signal, and one that does fire when the task switcher opens. At most a second can now be lost, which is well inside the delay nobody is charged for anyway. 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.
Let the turn run at least 40 seconds before you quit. This is the whole check, and doing it any faster proves nothing: for the first 12 seconds of a turn the delay absorbs everything and the reserve clock is supposed to sit still, so a clock that has lost its place looks exactly like one that hasn't. Quit well past the delay and the time must come back lower than it was at the turn switch — and the delay counter must not be sitting at a full 12. That is how a broken save hid from this check from 1.0 to 1.3.
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 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/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.