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

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

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.

Yeah, that would certainly help.  The painful part is the staged
uploads, meaning that you first have to upload a partial version of
android-platform-build and android-platform-system-core, then upload
other things that depend on those, then upload the full versions.
That's because of circular dependencies between the git repos/source
packages.

https://wiki.debian.org/AndroidTools#Updating_the_source_packages

I propose a much easier way to use the android-tools packages from
stretch: add testing as a package source, but pin it at very low
priority so you have to manually install packages from that repo.   This
is the same setup as jessie-backports.  Then you can start working with
the stretch versions of the packages while on jessie.  I think the 7.0
SDK packages will be easier to backport since there is only one circular
dep: android-platform-system-core.  We're aiming to have those included
in stretch's final release.

Also, FYI, stretch will freeze in November, so it will be soon not
changing very much.


>> 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

Ok, at least its easy to build.  There are still a lot of issues related
to the packaging and integrating with the compilers already in Debian.

.hc