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

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Wolfgang Wiedmeyer:
> 
> Hans-Christoph Steiner writes:
> 
>> Wolfgang Wiedmeyer:
>>> Hi 殷啟聰,
>>>
>>> 殷啟聰 writes:
>>>> About the backports, I myself won't have time for it because we have
>>>> been working on updating the packages to Nougat, but unfortunately it
>>>> is still stuck because one of the key packages
>>>> android-platform-libcore are still waiting in Debian's NEW package
>>>> queue. I'm afraid Nougat (and Jack) won't be available in Stretch.
>>>> Besides, Stretch is coming soon, there's not much time for backporting
>>>> to Jessie, I think.
>>>
>>> As I managed to get the build working on Stretch, I don't need the
>>> Jessie backports anymore. But it would obviously be awesome if Jack would
>>> be available in Stretch backports then.
>>
>> This is all great news!  We can of course get jack into
>> stretch/backports.  Do you need Nougat in Stretch in the near future?
>> That'd be a lot more work.
> 
> I'd guess that Replicant won't move beyond Marshmallow in the near
> future, so not necessarily. But if you package new stuff like Jack and
> if it's then only available in your Nougat-based packages, then it would
> be interesting again.
> 
> Another question is if it still makes sense to spend time and efforts to
> get a newer Replicant SDK build. If you guys have packaged the SDK, it
> probably makes more sense to get your packages into some of the
> Debian/Ubuntu-based FSDG-compliant distros. I'm not sure about
> Arch-based distros, though.
> 
> Wolfgang

If the Replicant SDK is just a 100% Free Software rebuild, then I think
it makes sense to join efforts here.  Our packaging is mostly just
simple custom Makefiles where they are needed, otherwise we use the
upstream gradle stuff a lot, although patches are basically always required.

Since we have gotten these packages into Debian, all the Debian-based
distros should automatically inherit them.  For example, they are
already automatically included in Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu release team
seems to pay attention to them.  At least, they are very quick to
respond when we ask them for things.  As for uploading them directly to
another Debian-based distro, it should be easy enough to do on just
about any of them.  The external deps are very minimal and basic, but
its a lot of source packages.

I think it makes sense to also work out a common package format in
conjunction with other distros too.  We've now gone through 3 different
packaging architectures, and are reasonably happy with the current
structure.

.hc