Brave News Sources Migration

[fallaciousreasoning]

Description

One of the issues we have with the new Brave News work is that we need to ensure that the user doesn't lose access to any of their subscriptions when we switch over to the new list of feeds (which doesn't contain all of the ones in the old feed list).

Our proposed solution here is to add the feeds which have disappeared, that the user was subscribed to to the user's direct feeds. However, in order to do this, we need to be able to look up (potentially any) historical feed.

To do this, I propose adding a /historical-sources.json to the Brave News CDN. At it's most simple, this is an APPEND ONLY list of every source that has ever been available in Brave News, across all languages. This list probably doesn't need as much detail as sources.json and we could probably get by with just: publisher_id, publisher_title and feed_url.

If we did this, and set up a migrator for unknown sources, it would give us the ability to change sources.json with impunity, not needing to worry that we're going to affect what users see in their feeds.

[fallaciousreasoning]

@petemill @aurangzaib048 for your thoughts

[stephendonner]

Verified PASSED using

Brave	1.46.81 Chromium: 107.0.5304.68 (Official Build) beta (x86_64)
Revision	a4e93e89d3b3df1be22214603fba846ad0183ca5-refs/branch-heads/5304@{#991}
OS	macOS Version 11.7.1 (Build 20G918)

Steps:

1. installed 1.46.81
2. launched Brave
3. opened a new-tab page
4. scrolled down
5. clicked on Show Brave News
6. clicked on Customize
7. clicked on Brave News
8. clicked on All Sources
9. toggled Hollywood Life to Enabled
10. opened brave://flags/
11. set brave://flags/#brave-news-v2 to Enabled
12. clicked on Relaunch
13. confirmed I was Following the Hollywood Life feed source

(But could not confirm it via Brave News feed. Will continue investigating and file, if needed.)

example	example	example

[MadhaviSeelam]

Verification PASSED using

Brave | 1.46.83 Chromium: 107.0.5304.68 (Official Build) beta (64-bit)
-- | --
Revision | a4e93e89d3b3df1be22214603fba846ad0183ca5-refs/branch-heads/5304@{#991}
OS | Windows 11 Version 21H2 (Build 22000.1098)

Steps:

1. Install 1.46.83
2. opened a new-tab page
3. scrolled down
4. clicked on Show Brave News
5. clicked on Customize
6. clicked on Brave News
7. clicked on All Sources
8. toggled Hollywood Life to Enabled
9. opened brave://flags/
10. set brave://flags/#brave-news-v2 to Enabled
11. clicked on Relaunch
12. click to open NTP
13. confirmed Brave News is still enabled
14. click Customize
15. click Brave News
16. new Brave News UI displayed

Confirmed Hollywood Life feed source displayed on the left panel of the Following section

step 4	step 8	step10	result

[srirambv]

Verification passed on Oppo Reno 5 with Android 12 running 1.46.87 x64 beta build

• Verified steps from brave/brave-core#14565
• Verified manually enabled source is listed under Your sources post migration

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17010094/199657735-6ac9c1c9-4c6e-46a2-bd71-19a185194c11.mp4

[btlechowski]

Verification passed on

Brave	1.46.117 Chromium: 107.0.5304.110 (Official Build) beta (64-bit)
Revision	2a558545ab7e6fb8177002bf44d4fc1717cb2998-refs/branch-heads/5304@{#1202}
OS	Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Steps:

1. Install 1.45.x
2. opened a new-tab page
3. scrolled down
4. clicked on Show Brave News
5. clicked on Customize
6. clicked on Brave News
7. clicked on All Sources
8. toggled Hollywood Life to Enabled
9. install 1.46.x
10. clicked on Relaunch
11. click to open NTP
12. confirmed Brave News is still enabled
13. click Customize
14. click Brave News
15. new Brave News UI displayed

Confirmed Hollywood Life feed source displayed on the left panel of the Following section

1.45.x

1.46.x