2.0~alpha1

[wstyres]

THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE. DO NOT INSTALL IT IF YOU ARE NOT COMFORTABLE REPORTING ISSUES OR WORKING WITH SYSTEM FILES

Hi everyone! It has been awhile since the last beta and you may have noticed that we've skipped over a stable release of Zebra 1.2 in favor of Zebra 2.0. Before I get into the details there are some new things you need to know about alphas of Zebra:

• For the time being, Zebra 2.0 can only be installed on devices with a Procursus bootstrap. This is a technical limitation and I hope to have it resolved by the time the full release of Zebra 2.0 comes out.
  • Jailbreaks with a Procursus bootstrap include: Chimera, Odyssey, Odysseyra1n, and Taurine.
  • There are no jailbreaks on iOS 11 that support Procursus
• Betas of Zebra are now installed as a separate package. This means that the beta version of Zebra can be installed alongside of the stable version. This also means that you will have to downgrade the main Zebra package to 1.1.18 in order to install the Zebra 2.0 beta. This was done to ensure that the user still has a stable package manager while trying out the Zebra beta.
  • If you are experiencing issues after downgrading to Zebra 1.1.18 from the 1.2 betas you will have to delete your database file that is located at /var/mobile/Library/Application Support/xyz.willy.zebra/zebra.db and reopen Zebra.
• Zebra 2.0 uses merged sources list and will contain the same sources that other package managers like Cydia and Sileo use. If you have extra sources installed exclusively into Zebra 1.x, there is a migration option available in the add source menu.
• This is an alpha not a beta. It may be prone to crashing in which case I'm relying on testers to be able to report crashes to me and very specific reproduction steps.
• I will also be closing a lot of old issues that applied to the 1.2 betas because they no longer apply. If they still apply in the 2.0 alpha please reopen your issue.

Now that is out of the way, let's talk about Zebra 2.0 itself. Why did I skip over 1.2? The simple answer is that there was a huge backend rewrite between 1.1 and 1.2. I already rewrote the database backend for Zebra 1.2 but I was not happy with how it turned out as there were several crashes and inconsistencies with the new system. Because of this, I decided to switch Zebra's backend from my own implementation over to libapt which is by far more stable and much better at dependency resolution.

Not many new features have been added since the last 1.2 beta but because of this huge rewrite, a lot of things are currently non-functional as I have not converted them over to the new libapt backend. These features will be added back in a future beta so if you're going to miss them I would suggest not updating quite yet. Here is a list of features that are not currently implemented in Zebra 2.0:

• Source Filters
• Package Filters
• Featured Packages
• Payment API support
• Changes
• Community News
• Favorites
• Ignoring package updates
• Package Sharing
• Source List Export
• Settings
• iOS 12 dark mode
• Package Compatibility
• URI Schemes
• Notifications
• Package swipe actions

There may be more features missing that I have not listed here but I will update the list if new ones are found. These features will be reimplemented at some point in the beta process but I wanted to get this initial beta out first to test the new libapt backend before developing new features.

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This discussion was created from the release 2.0~alpha1.