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

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Wolfgang Wiedmeyer:
> Sorry for my late reply!
> 
> Hans-Christoph Steiner writes:
> 
>> 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
> 
> Awesome! Are there any plans to do a backport to Jessie?
>
>> 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.
> 
> I'm very interested in that and I already try to use everything that is
> available in Jessie. It would be great to have all host tools either
> build from source as part of Replicant or getting them from Jessie. I'm
> already pretty close to that. In fact, I'm only aware of the
> manifest-merger and some binaries from the NDK repo that run on the
> build host and are not yet from Jessie or build from source. This is for
> building a ROM image, to build the SDK a lot more is needed. I'm
> focusing on the host tools for now to make the build itself more
> trustworthy, but the goal is to get rid of all the prebuilts.
> 
> Replicant needs to be buildable on a GNU FSDG-compliant
> distribution. While I think it's fine that my focus is currently on
> Debian, it should be possible to build it on a FSDG-compliant distro
> like Trisquel in the future. A dependence on the backports repo could
> make this more difficult, but I don't see an other option at the moment.
> 
> Thanks,
> Wolfgang

We're still focused on getting everything working in testing.  Backport
to jessie is feasible, but its a chunk of work.  How essential is it for
you?  It would make the workflow a lot easier if you work on stretch,
since we can then make updates and fixes in one place.

We already have the bulk of the SDK tools packaged.  Its really just the
odd things like renderscript that are not.  As for building the NDK from
source, that's a whole other question.  It would probably be pretty easy
to package ndk-build since its just a collection of Make scripts.  But
actually building the compilers would be a large project.

.hc