Files
agendula/provider/PROVENANCE.md
Jean-Luc Makiola 13cb27b2ab docs: decide to build our own store and delete the vendored provider
The vendored dmfs provider was kept on the grounds that it hands us the
sync bookkeeping for free. The phase-1 sync audit measured that
bookkeeping and found most of it broken, absent, or unusable: _DIRTY not
set on delete, no home for a per-collection sync token, read-only
collections inexpressible, ACCOUNT_TYPE write-once so enabling sync is a
full migration, and cleanUpLists able to delete a user's lists after a
backup restore. Sixteen findings are provider-imposed rather than
platform- or protocol-imposed.

Costing the alternative showed the swap is far smaller than assumed.
TasksDataSource is already a 14-method, domain-shaped interface;
exactly one file above the data layer references TasksContract. The
work is a second implementation behind an interface built for it, not a
rewrite. Against ~5 weeks to build, owning the store removes 2.5-4
weeks from the sync plan, and 8,200 of the vendored 14,555 lines are
things we would never write - 23 migrations from a 2013 schema, 798
lines of full-text search the app has zero call sites for, and 1,581
lines of a type-safe layer over ContentValues that Room deletes.

External mode (OpenTasks, tasks.org) is unaffected and keeps every
file that describes somebody else's schema.

STORAGE-DECISION.md is the reasoning; OWN-STORE.md is the architecture
and the six-phase plan. :provider stays in-tree until phase 5 so
recurrence parity can be tested against it before it goes.

Also corrected here: the provider's JVM test count (51 -> 56, measured
from the test-results XML) and a fourth site of the debunked "switching
sync on is never a migration" claim, in StorageMode.kt.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-13 14:46:07 +02:00

11 KiB
Raw Blame History

:provider — provenance

This module is not our code. It is the dmfs task provider, vendored, with its namespace renamed to ours and a short list of changes recorded below.

Upstream dmfs/opentasks
Module taken opentasks-provider, plus opentasks-contract (see Why the contract came along)
Version 1.4.2
Commit 49ebf80b1eeee52a611e5a22f24f849852a6255f (2021-03-21)
License Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE and NOTICE, both upstream's, unmodified
Database version 23

Agendula itself is MIT. Apache-2.0 into MIT is fine in that direction, but this module keeps its own LICENSE, NOTICE, and per-file Apache headers, and those must survive any future edit here.

1.4.2 specifically, for the database version. DB 23 is the first to carry is_recurring. tasks.org's fork is DB 22 and lacks it — which is why TaskMapper.task on the app side derives recurrence from rrule/rdate instead of trusting that column, and why it must keep doing so as long as External mode supports tasks.org.

Why vendored at all

Recorded properly in docs/STORAGE-AND-SYNC.md; in one line: the permission names are hardcoded in the upstream AAR's manifest. No prebuilt artifact — Maven Central, JitPack, anything — can have them renamed without tools: node surgery, and shipping under dmfs's own permission names would make Agendula and OpenTasks mutually uninstallable (INSTALL_FAILED_DUPLICATE_PERMISSION). In-tree also satisfies F-Droid's from-source requirement, which a JitPack artifact would not.

In-tree rather than a git submodule, unlike floret-kit: we co-develop the kit, whereas this is a fork we expect to resync from upstream approximately never.

The namespace rename

Everything in this table is a rename and nothing more. The contract shape is untouched — same tables, same column names, same URI paths — because that shape is what our data layer, and every CalDAV engine, already speaks. We own the namespace it lives in, not the schema.

Upstream Ours
Authority org.dmfs.tasks de.jeanlucmakiola.agendula.tasks
Read permission org.dmfs.permission.READ_TASKS de.jeanlucmakiola.agendula.permission.READ_TASKS
Write permission org.dmfs.permission.WRITE_TASKS de.jeanlucmakiola.agendula.permission.WRITE_TASKS
Permission group org.dmfs.tasks.permissiongroup.Tasks de.jeanlucmakiola.agendula.permissiongroup.Tasks
Notification-alarm action org.dmfs.tasks.provider.NOTIFICATION_ALARM de.jeanlucmakiola.agendula.provider.NOTIFICATION_ALARM
Resource prefix opentasks_* agendula_*
R class org.dmfs.tasks.provider.R de.jeanlucmakiola.agendula.provider.R

What was deliberately not renamed

  • Java package names stay org.dmfs.provider.tasks / org.dmfs.tasks.contract. They are not a registered namespace — two apps may share them freely — and keeping them means the diff against upstream stays legible. Only the AGP namespace (which decides where R lands) is ours.
  • TaskContract.LOCAL_ACCOUNT_TYPE stays "org.dmfs.account.LOCAL". It is a value stored in the database and recognised by dmfs-contract providers generally, so the same app code has to write it whether it is talking to our provider or, in External mode, to OpenTasks. Renaming it would fork the write path in two for no gain.
  • ACTION_BROADCAST_TASK_DUE / …_TASK_STARTING / ACTION_DATABASE_INITIALIZED. Every send site calls setPackage() on its own package first, so these never cross app boundaries and cannot collide with an installed OpenTasks.

Changes to upstream source

Four files under src/main/java, one under src/test/java. Each edit is marked with an AGENDULA CHANGE comment at the site, so this list and the code cannot drift apart. Keep that convention.

Behavioural

  1. Utils.cleanUpLists — only prune account types we authenticate ourselves. The one change here that is about correctness rather than mechanics.

    Upstream holds GET_ACCOUNTS and enumerates every account on the device. We dropped that permission (below), so AccountManager only ever reports accounts of our own type. Upstream's cleanup deletes any task list whose account is absent from that array — and an account we cannot see is indistinguishable from one that has been removed. Left alone, the provider would quietly delete synced lists. Not "sync stops": data disappears, with no error anywhere.

    Now a list is only prunable when its account type belongs to an authenticator in this package. Agendula ships no authenticator yet, so the set is empty and nothing is ever pruned; our sync adapter's type will join it on its own when it lands, no edit needed here. Local lists were already exempt upstream.

  2. TaskProvider.insert — the same restriction for the stale-list signal. Upstream flags "list with unknown account" and broadcasts about it. With the account cache holding only our own accounts, that fired on every insert into any externally-synced list. Nothing listens today; the point is that whatever listens tomorrow gets a signal that means something.

  3. TaskProviderBroadcastReceiver.onReceive — fall-through written out. Upstream's switch has no break in any branch, so TIMEZONE_CHANGED runs all three content operations and NOTIFICATION_ALARM runs the last two. The comment on the first branch ("don't trigger the notifications update yet") describes breaks that were never written, so the code and the stated intent contradict each other.

    Observed behaviour is preserved exactly, just spelled out with ifs rather than reached by accident. A vendored fork is the wrong place to guess at intent. ⚠️ Open: which of the two is the bug wants a device with a task due across a timezone change to settle.

  4. TaskProviderBroadcastReceiver.planNotificationUpdate — inexact-alarm fallback. setExact throws SecurityException on API 3132 when the user revokes SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM — inside a receiver handling a system broadcast, so the app would die on every timezone change. Falls back to set when exact alarms aren't permitted. This alarm drives only the provider's own bookkeeping; Agendula's user-visible reminders come from ReminderScheduler, which asks for the permission properly.

Required by modern Android (would not build or would crash otherwise)

  1. PendingIntent.FLAG_IMMUTABLE added in planNotificationUpdate. Mandatory since Android 12; throws IllegalArgumentException without it at targetSdk ≥ 31. Upstream targets 29. Nothing mutates the intent later, so immutable is also correct on the merits.
  2. android:exported stated explicitly on the receiver. AGP hard-errors on an intent-filtered component without it at targetSdk ≥ 31.
  3. package= attribute removed from the manifest; AGP 8+ takes it from the namespace in the build file.
  4. <uses-sdk tools:overrideLibrary="org.dmfs.android.contenttestpal"/> removed along with the androidTest sources it existed for (below).

Permissions

  1. android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS dropped. We only ever need to see accounts of our own type, and since API 26 an authenticator makes those visible to its own package with no grant at all. Safe only in combination with change 1 — the two must be read together.

Build and test

  1. build.gradlebuild.gradle.kts, on the root version catalog. minSdk 21 → 29 (matching :app; the merger rejects a lower floor), Java 8 → 17.
  2. Test stack modernised, sources otherwise untouched: JUnit 4.12 → 4.13.2, Robolectric 3.5.1 → 4.16, Mockito 2.27 → 5.20, Hamcrest 1.3 → 3.0. org.dmfs:jems, rfc5545-datetime and lib-recur stay on the versions upstream pinned — all three resolve from Maven Central, so no new repository was added (settings.gradle.kts is still google() + mavenCentral() under FAIL_ON_PROJECT_REPOS).
  3. ZippedTest.testAbsent — diamond new Zipped<> given an explicit type argument. absent() pins no type, and javac 17 will not infer what javac 8 did. The assertion is unchanged.
  4. src/test/resources/robolectric.properties added (sdk=34, conscryptMode=OFF). A library module has no targetSdk for Robolectric to read, and Robolectric installs Conscrypt unconditionally, whose uber jar has no linux-aarch_64 native — so without this the suite fails at setup on ARM64 machines while passing on x86_64 CI. See the file for the reasoning.
  5. src/androidTest dropped entirely. It depends on contentpal / contenttestpal, which are JitPack-only; adding JitPack would widen the dependency trust surface for test-only code. ⚠️ This is the one place vendoring lost coverage — those were the provider's integration tests (recurrence, reparenting, instances, observers). The 56 JVM tests in src/test all pass and are retained.
  6. agendula_provider_changed_receivers emptied. Upstream notifies org.andstatus.todoagenda, which listens for changes to the dmfs authority and has never heard of ours. Anything re-added here also needs a <queries> entry in the app manifest or package-visibility rules drop the broadcast.
  7. Translated agendula_provider_label overrides removed (the other translated strings are kept as upstream shipped them). The base label became "Agendula tasks" so it is distinguishable from OpenTasks' own "Tasks" entry in the system permission dialog; the inherited translations still said plain "Tasks" in their language, which would have contradicted it.

Resyncing from upstream

Unlikely to ever be worth it — upstream 1.4.2 is from 2021 — but if it is: the AGENDULA CHANGE markers are the complete list of what to reapply, git log on this directory is the audit trail, and the 56 JVM tests are the safety net. Re-read change 1 before touching anything account-related.

Known-unverified

Everything here is verified by the JVM test suite and a clean build. What is not yet verified on a device with real data:

  • The local-list path with no account present at all — the entirety of Local mode. cleanUpLists exempts local lists explicitly and change 1 makes the prunable set empty, so it should hold by construction; it is covered by ProviderAccountCleanupTest, but that is Robolectric, not a device.
  • The timezone-change behaviour in change 3.
  • Any interaction with an external sync engine writing into our authority (nothing does yet — that is the DAVx5 ask, step 4 of the sequencing).