[Android-tools-devel] Building Jack/Jill and other Android build tools from source

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

(cc'ing the android-tools-devel list for the record)

We're interested in packaging as much of the Android tools as possible,
we'd also be interested in the manifest-merger.  We have manifest-merger
built as a JAR in the android-platform-tools-base package, but we
haven't really exposed it.  You can see it listed here:

https://packages.debian.org/stretch/all/android-platform-tools-base/filelist

If you are interested in basing your ROM builds on Debian, then we can
shift priorities some to work on fixing issues related to ROM builds.
We're currently focused on getting app building working with the Debian
packages.

.hc

Wolfgang Wiedmeyer:
> Hi,
> 
> actually, I wanted to write you guys much earlier, but I was pretty busy
> the last months. We met at FOSDEM 2016. In case you don't remember me:
> I was the bearded guy at the Replicant meeting on Sunday and we also
> talked after Hans' presentation. Kai-Chung was especially interested in
> building the Jack/Jill toolchain from source and I promised him to write
> about my findings.
> I'm currently working on the (hopefully) next version of Replicant based
> on CyanogenMod 13. My forum post gives an overview of my work, but it's
> a bit outdated now: https://redmine.replicant.us/boards/21/topics/12057
> 
> One of my focus areas is the toolchain. I want to get rid of all the
> prebuilt tools, either by using packaged versions from Debian Jessie or
> by building them from source. I was able to replace a lot of tools with
> their Debian counterparts. The Android gcc/llvm toolchain is built from
> source, but a few binaries from the prebuilt NDK are still needed, so
> it's not a complete bootstrap. The rudimentary build script and my
> changes to the build repository are probably most interesting for you in
> that regard:
> https://code.fossencdi.org/vendor_replicant.git/tree/build-toolchain?h=replicant-6.0
> https://code.fossencdi.org/replicant_build.git/log/?h=replicant-6.0&qt=author&q=Wiedmeyer
> But changes to various other repositories were also needed.
> Building the latest version of Jack/Jill from a release branch like
> ub-jack-brest was possible, but the resulting binaries were not stable
> enough to build a complete image. I figured out that a file in the jars
> contains the sha hash of the commit that was used to build them. So I
> based my changes on the referenced commit from the prebuilt sdk for
> Android 6.0. You can find them here:
> https://code.fossencdi.org/toolchain_jack.git/log/?h=replicant-6.0
> https://code.fossencdi.org/toolchain_jill.git/log/?h=replicant-6.0
> The build instructions are at the end of the rudimentary build script.
> The resulting binaries work without any issues. I didn't find any
> binaries in the Jill source code, but the Jack source code contains
> some. Again, I used what was available from Debian or replaced the
> binaries with a proper build from source. Only the ecj binary in the ecj
> directory is still needed. I was not able to build a recent ecj from
> source, so help in that regard would be much appreciated!
> 
> Besides that, the manifest-merger tool is still needed to build a full
> image for the Galaxy S3. The tool seems to be buildable with gradle and
> the source is here:
> https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/base/+/android-6.0.1_r55/build-system/manifest-merger/
> Would you be interested to package the manifest-merger for Debian?
> Building a full SDK needs much more prebuilts than building a device
> image, so I will focus on that at a later point. In the worst case, I
> have to readd a lot of prebuilts again.
> 
> I hope that my work helps you in some way! I also try to follow your 
> work on #debian-mobile. My Nick on freenode and oftc is wiewo.
> 
> Best regards,
> Wolfgang
>