I recently picked up some work on F-Droid’s metadata repository, as @Coffee wrote in the F-Droid forum, that help was needed.

My workflow looks as follows:

First I clone F-Droids metadata repository:

$git clone git@gitlab.com:fdroid/fdroiddata.git
$cd fdroiddata/metadata

Then I grep for all files that miss a changelog:

$grep -L "Changelog" *.txt

As a result I get a list of all txt metadata files that do not contain the String “Changelog”. Those are our culprits.

For every of those files (quite a bunch) we now need to find a changelog. Unfortunately there is no standard place to put a changelog and many developers don’t do changelogs at all for their apps.

Nice places to search are any existing “changelog.md”, “changelog.txt” etc. Though I think that @Izzy covered all of those already. As a next step I’d search the apps website (if it exists) for a changelog section, or do a quick Google search for it (worked for me in case of Wikipedia, PEP…). Lastly I check, if the release section in the repository contains useful information (i.e. not just “Bump version”, but actually useful information about added features and such).

In case I find any of those information, I add the URL to the changelog to the metadata file. See for example the changes to the Wikipedia Android app metadata.

Usually I make those changes in a dedicated branch per app (eg. wikipedia_changelog) and then create a merge request against the fdroiddata repository.

I hope my post will inspire someone to join in on the work 😀
I’m working my way from the bottom up (from ‘z’ to ‘a’), so it would be nice if I could meet somebody in the middle 😉