[Android-tools-devel] GSoC 2016 Week 4: Android SDK Tools in Debian

[Chirayu Desai]

Hello everyone,

This week I had my first package updates land in Debian.
My mentors approved my RFSs for the packages src:apktool and
src:android-platform-frameworks-base, and the versions are currently
available in unstable.
Those include the bugs I fixed in the previous week [1].
Together they make apktool functional enough to decompile apps.

After that, I started trying to build an app with just the android-sdk
package from debian, without any binaries from Google.
I pushed a very basic ("Hello, World!") android app, based on a gradle
for android tutorial to [2].
It helps with focusing on the build system rather than any
dependencies for a specific application.

What I did was try to build the app, then debug / fix / replace the
failing components, and then repeat. This gave us an idea of what
would we need to do to get to that goal.
The bugreports are #827214 [3], #827215 [4], and #827216 [5].
* #827214 is an easy fix, only needing two small text files with some
version information.
* #827215 requires significant effort, and isn't needed for the vast
majority of android apps, so after discussing with my mentors it was
decided to just have a dummy script in place to make the compiler
happy, for now.
* #827216 is a major issue, the aapt tool is used to build the android
resources (images, strings, etc), and is failing pretty hard. I did
try to debug it, and also had a discussion with my mentors, but I have
been unable to get it working till now.

I'll be trying to fix as many of the above bugs as I can in week 5, to
have an android app building with just debian packages.

Regards,
Chirayu Desai

[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-outreach/2016/06/msg00021.html
[2]: https://gitlab.com/cde/AndroidHelloWorld
[3]: https://bugs.debian.org/827214
[4]: https://bugs.debian.org/827215
[5]: https://bugs.debian.org/827216