DeltaChat running on mobian (PineTab, PinePhone)

[lk108]

@Minim

Minor problem: if I rotate the phone screen repeatedly while using Deltatouch, (damaged touchscreen on one Pinephone) then DeltaTouch sometimes flips upside-down and stays in that orinetation regardess of how I rotate the phone. If I close and reopen the app it stops, so really not serious.

Repeatedly flipping the orientation also sometimes seems to freeze the app, and it refuses to close; a bit more troublesome.

I can’t reproduce this. Repeatedly rotating does not cause any problem with DeltaTouch on a Fairphone 3 running Ubuntu Touch, and my OnePlus 6T running Mobian does not offer auto-rotation (manually switching orientation multiple times worked fine). Maybe the sum of all the layers of implementation of rotation (Qt + Lomiri UI TK + DeltaTouch) is too heavy for the Pinephone.

Do you mind sharing the log when the app freezes? It’s here: ~/.cache/deltatouch.lotharketterer/logfile.txt. Check and remove any personal info first.

I’m not getting notifications. I’ll experiment more between two Mobian Pinephones and try to give details.

Works for me in Mobian. Do you have notifications enabled in the Settings? Also, the app must be running in the background for notifications, it does not ship a service/daemon (yet?).

When not repeatedly rotated, though, the app has been working well, and I appreciate the UI design that means that an accidental slip or double tap never seems to do anything dreadful; but instead does stuff like opening the “about” page.

The “opening the ‘about’ page” part had me puzzled at first, but I think it happens when you double tap the Settings icon. First tap opens Settings, and the second tap is interpreted as a tap on the same location, but in Settings page, and that’s the icon for the About page then. Maybe I need to catch double taps.

[Minim]

I would share the log file, but it hasn’t happened to me again; only happened when adding accounts. It has also happened with Firefox once (it froze at 90 degrees to vertical). So I’m going to class this as “not DeltaTouch’s problem anyway”.

I found a third place to enable notifications, and yes, it now works. Thank you.

Please don’t worry about my double-taps, they are caused by the crack in my screen. The phone’s still useful for testing, but some apps are annoyingly hard to use with a dodgy screen; yours isn’t.

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but for the record of this thread, my only current problems are an inability to manually import public keys of recipients, and an inability to manually export the password of a chatmail account (which would let me use another client to initiate the correspondance). These are general Deltachat issues not specific to Deltatouch.

[lk108]

@Minim

manually import public keys of recipients

There are some suggestions here, but nothing user friendly yet afaik.

@Minim

an inability to manually export the password of a chatmail account (which would let me use another client to initiate the correspondance).

In DeltaTouch, click on the header of the chatlist (e.g., your avatar or username). This should open the account switcher. Swipe the entry of your account to the left and click on the “edit” icon. This should open a page that says “Login” and contains your password.

In the official Android app, it’s in Settings → Advanced → Password and Account.

[Minim]

Thank you! I hadn’t realized I could swipe an account sideways.

For Chatmail accounts. the password is hidden as a series of dots, and the eye icon to toggle it visible is greyed out, so I can’t see my (auto-generated) password.

I assume this isn’t deliberate design on your part.

[lk108]

@Minim

For Chatmail accounts. the password is hidden as a series of dots, and the eye icon to toggle it visible is greyed out,

Hm, are you sure you can’t toggle the visibility of the password via the eye icon? There’s nothing in the code that disables this functionality. And I just checked, it works for me for chatmail accounts, too. The clickable area of the eye icon might be too small, maybe your touches were just outside of it.

[Minim]

The grey eye icon turned out to be in a dead part of my screen in all four rotations. As of yesterday, I have a new screen and I can easily show the password. Thank you for your help!

[Minim]

I have a much more replicable report; these steps almost always cause these glitches for me.

*Open Deltatouch.
*In an account view, press the 4-square icon.
*In the QRcode view, press either the network or the hamburger icon, before or after you rotate the phone into landscape mode with the buttons down, and thus the top of the phone to your right.
*The background but not the popup will be upsidedown.
*If you picked the hamburger and now press “copy to clipboard”, then the inversion persists thru subsequent rotations.

Separately, when I press the “Scan QR code” button afterwardswith my camera hardware not running, DT usually freezes and has to be killed.

I can post logs for this if it is idiosyncratic and you can’t easily replicate.

[Minim]

Okay, so this only happens if my camera is disabled (airgapped with the killswitch) or malfunctioning. If opening Megapixels produces an image, it seems everything in Deltachat works fine.

So Deltatouch just needs to check if it has a functioning camera and give an appropriate error message if not. Or just timeout. In the event of not having a camera, the paste-from-clipboard function should still work.

Sorry it took me so long to figure this out.

[lk108]

With

@Minim

this only happens

do you mean this part from your earlier post?

@Minim

Separately, when I press the “Scan QR code” button afterwards, DT usually freezes and has to be killed.

Or is this valid for the rotation stuff, too?

[Minim]

The rotation problem persists with the camera working. It’s just the scan-QR-code issue which seems camera-dependent. Sorry to be unclear.

As the inversion issue is very contextual, it is easy to avoid. It also vanishes if I close and restart Deltatouch in the usual manner.

The QR scan issue can’t be avoided if I am copypasting, except by making sure the camera is running. In person, I can have the other party scan my QR code instead of the other way around. When the scan issue happens, it freezes DT until DT is killed, or until reboot.

[lk108]

@Minim

The QR scan issue can’t be avoided

Ok, I’ll look into it.

@Minim

The grey eye icon turned out to be in a dead part of my screen in all four rotations

No way

[Minim]

Thank you very much, I very much appreciate the work you have put in on this client.

I should mention I can’t copy-paste the QR invite codes of servers, either, though I can load them from identical QR code images saved on disk. If the camera isn’t working, it also freezes and hangs. I hope this parallel helps.

I never see a camera image in-app, so I can’t test scanning.

This last is utterly trivial, but at Installation on Mobian and Droidian (manual, experimental) - lk108/deltatouch - Codeberg.org two of the links to click packages are dead, and one links to an amd64 file instead of a arm64 file. The right files are easy to find. The “rm -rf” also works fine with just “rm -r”.

[lk108]

@Minim

two of the links to click packages are dead, and one links to an amd64 file instead of a arm64 file

Fixed, thank you for reporting!

@Minim

The “rm -rf” also works fine with just “rm -r”

Without f, it’s quite tedious for people that have alias rm='rm -i' set

[Minim]

Thanks! Is there anywhere I can download the outdated click packages? I want to test if an app stopped interoperating at a specific version, and swapping versions to test would be easy if I had the older click packages.

[lk108]

@Minim

Is there anywhere I can download the outdated click packages?

There is, but I’m not sure whether this will help you. Older versions of the app contain older versions of the chatmail/core library, and trying to access your existing account database with an older version of the core is not supported and will most likely not work (maybe it can even mess up the account database on your device, not sure). IIRC, it’s also not possible to use “add second device” when the receiving app is based on an older version of the core than the sending app. So your only option would be a very old backup.

Even then, I doubt that an older version will really help you as the code that accesses the camera hasn’t really changed over time.

Your problem is on the Pinephone running Mobian, correct? Let me install Mobian on my Pinephone and try to reproduce the issue. I’m somewhat under pressure at my dayjob until end of June, but will still try to come up with something asap.

All that said, if you really want to try older versions at your own peril, here they are. Only the Focal ones will work.

[lk108]

@lk108

install Mobian on my Pinephone and try to reproduce the issue

I could reproduce the issue, although it happens for me regardless of the state of the hardware switches for the camera. It seems to be an incompatibility of the Qt5 camera stack with the PinePhone - I even compiled the app on the PinePhone to exclude binary incompatibilities. With current resources for DeltaTouch, I don’t see that this can be fixed other than providing a possibility to run DeltaTouch in a way that doesn’t use the Qt camera stack (with smth like an env var DT_NO_CAMERA). (Edit: At least on my PinePhone, it’s not possible to check whether a camera is present or not, because Qt reports exactly one camera, whether the dip switches are on or off)

@Minim Would you be willing to test it if I implement this in the next days and set up a pre-release? (Edit2: Would be with the same core library version as used in v1.16.2, so you could go back to the current release)

[Minim]

I’m entirely willing to test it, and would be even if I did risk complete data loss. But don’t rush to code it, especially if things are busy at work. The fact that it took me this long to figure out that I never see camera images in DeltaTouch tells you how often I turn on my camera; I am reporting these issues as a contrib, not because they are particularly inconvenient to me. There are simple workarounds.

I’ve now tested on a second Pinephone, this one running its OS in the onboard memory, and scanning QR codes does not work but trying does not freeze them.

Thanks for the link, downloaded. Thank you for the heads-up on DC compatibility. Obviously I should have backed up my old data… I just backed up my keys in three places. I suppose I could sync my data elsewhere, uninstall, and install an older version of DeltaTouch from scratch.

I was actually looking at the functioning-over-time of a webxdc app, nothing to do with DT, so it may not be worthwhile. I hadn’t characterized it fully, but I think at least some elements of these two DT issues were present in 1.8.0.

=================

Actually, not being able to add a second device that is using a less recent client could be a problem, since Debian stable comes out every two years, and the stable version might not be the latest by the time it comes out, due to the freeze. So one might not be able to add a Debian stable device, ever.

This is obviously a Deltachat issue and not a DeltaTouch issue. As far as I know DC chats are not in a standard format like Maildir, so backporting them seems likely to be difficult; presumably the keys of accounts and contacts, and account login data, would be easy to backport as they are standard formats. It seems possible that a future design of Deltachat might make porting to an older client simple.

Would I be right to assume that adding a device using a different client, say Arcane chat, might also fail if they are using different backend versions?

edit: Apparently there has been work on Autoencrypt Setup Messages, part of the Autoencrypt standard, for exactly this purpose, but they seem not to be in use and I am ignorant of their exact status.

[cyrneko]

DeltaChat Desktop is available on Flathub including an aarch64 build. Surprisingly the UI adjusts to slim screens so using it on a mobile device should be alright, even if not perfect

[ell1e]

Did you report the camera issue already? If not, please consider reporting it to mobian, or if you’re using postmarketOS, please consider reporting it here with details: Bug reporting form

[Minim]

Thank you, Cyrneko! I’m interested in getting a Deltachat client into the Debian package database; the standards-based long-term interoperability makes Deltachat a good fit for a distro that releases a well-tested stable version every couple of years. Inclusion would make DT really safe and easy to install on any Debian-based distro, so having a client in Debian would drastically increase the number of people I could actually talk to on Deltachat.

DeltaChat Desktop has more dependencies that aren’t already packaged in Debian than DeltaTouch does. DeltaTouch is therefore much more likely to actually get packaged. So that is why I’d like, specifically, DeltaTouch to work well on Mobian.

As far as something-that-works in daily use goes, DT is already quite satisfactory, needing only a few little workarounds; manually loading QR codes, not clicking on its notifications (which raises an error popup, a separate minor issue I’ll detail properly in due course), and I guess keeping one really out-of-date client around somewhere to make it possible to install on Debian stable.