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

[Wolfgang Wiedmeyer]

Hans-Christoph Steiner writes:

> 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.

Stretch is not really an option right now. I'm already mirroring all the
repos from CyanogenMod to have everything in a "freezed" state. A
running target like Stretch would result in a lot of additional work to
keep up with the changes. Google seems to target an older Ubuntu LTS
release for building their native toolchain (compilers etc.). Debian
Stable is a much better fit for that. I already tried to help someone to
get everything build on Stretch until this person gave up. There were
quite some new build errors.

Maybe this is something where I could get involved? I backport a few
things for personal use: https://packages.fossencdi.org/
I could do some quick and dirty backports of needed packages and see how it works
out. Then, with your help and Debian Mentors, I could try to get them in
the official backports repos.

> 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.

Building the compilers works fine, but some binaries like a minimal
Android libc is needed. I also have to check what else is needed for
building a ROM, but it doesn't seem to be much.

Wolfgang

-- 
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