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by OSI-Auflauf 767 days ago
Telegram Foss clients exist only because of unpaid volunteers that take Telegrams messy mix of open and closed parts and rip closed parts out and replace them. The Telegram organisation is notoriously late to release the source code to their current release. If they do, its a giant squashed commit without proper changelog. These releases must then be first wrangled by volunteers to be well buildable.

The Telegram Org itself gives no support to volunteers at all.

You can't register with Foss builds. Only official binaries. Nowadays a lot of features are premium only. You can only get premium with official binaries. That part is closed.
3 comments
tssge 767 days ago
Telegram has fully reproducible builds and is not that complicated to build, no issues there. They even have a guide on how to build & verify. [0] No need to wrangle or modify, generally builds as is (at least from my experience).

Granted yes, the version commits are squashed like you said. [1] However I haven't seen source release to lag behind store releases, any sources on that?

0: https://core.telegram.org/reproducible-builds 1: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram

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OSI-Auflauf 767 days ago
That repo is not fully open.

Release lag -> Telegram foss needs to wrangle the release every time. Fdroid CI takes its time.

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tssge 767 days ago
Which parts are missing?

A couple months ago I actually verified a build of Telegram on my friend's phone as he thought something might be off and didn't have any issues there (the build matched).

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gkbrk 767 days ago
This doesn't affect the user that downloads these from distro repos or F-Droid because every single update they get comes from the source code. There is never a lag even for 1 second because without the source code there are no builds.

Pretty much all the packages on Linux repos come from package maintainers taking upstream source code, removing parts they don't like and then building that. This is a normal part of packaging and building open-source apps.

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OSI-Auflauf 767 days ago
Yes and thats why users spend sometimes months on old builds.

Also which distro packages Telegram?

Fedora doesn't. Debian does but at times it was so old the client crashed from receiving server comms because it wasn't fully compatible. It actually crashed as in segfault.

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5e92cb50239222b 767 days ago
https://repology.org/project/telegram-desktop/versions
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kaba0 767 days ago
Nix, arch, basically everything packages it.
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saagarjha 767 days ago
I take it you haven't been following Telegram for iOS and macOS.
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2OEH8eoCRo0 767 days ago
Good point- I forgot that the FOSS clients were 3rd party.
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