[Android-tools-devel] Fwd: Re: Bug#924591: this requires linking in libsparse, which is from Android sources

[殷啟聰 | Kai-Chung Yan]

-------- 轉寄郵件 --------
主旨: Re: Bug#924591: this requires linking in libsparse, which is from Android sources
日期: Thu, 18 Apr 2019 22:40:51 -0400
從: Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu>
到: Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at eds.org>, 924591 at bugs.debian.org, Jonas Meurer <jonas at freesources.org>
副本 (CC): android-tools-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 09:32:06PM +0200, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> 
> One possibility would be including libsparse as a patch, it doesn't
> change a lot:
> https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+log/master/libsparse
> 
> But it depends on Android's libbase and libz-host.

This might be "serious" bug from the fastboot package's perspective,
but there's no way in heck the release time is going to consider this
a bug that is "serious" priority for e2fsprogs.

More to the point, there's now way in the world I (or the release and
installer teams) are going to make e2fsprogs, which is an
"important=yes" package with priority "required" drag in the
android-libsparse, android-libbase, and zlib1g packages.

So the way you changed android-sdk-platforms-tools to use /sbin/mke2fs
was a really bad choice, especially this while we are in release
freeze for Buster.  There's no way in the world we are going to make a
change like this to a package like e2fsprogs which is used by the
installer at this point.

If we had more time, and if android-libsparse-dev shipped a static
library, we could have considered statically linking in
android-libsparse, android-libbase, and libz --- and see if they would
bloat the mke2fs and debugfs binaries by only a minimal amount.

This would also require making changes to e2fsprogs configure and
Makefiles, since currently we only have support for linking in
libsparse in the AOSP build files.  The reason for this is historical;
at the time when the intern working with Android team was working on
replace Android's make_ext4fs program with mke2fs and e2droid, there
was no distribution that was shipping libsparse, and trying to make
libsparse available to Linux desktop environments was *way* beyond the
scope of the Intern's project and time availability.

We can work on this trying to find a solution post-Buster --- either
using static linking, or *possibly* figuring out a way to optionally
use dlopen() to pull in libsparse for sparse_io.c, much like the way
libss optionally pulls in the readline library using dlopen at
runtime, back when we cared about making mke2fs fit on a two 1.44 MiB
boot/root install floppies.  :-)

Alternatively, you can build your own version of mke2fs using the
libsparse from AOSP.  If you want a solution that might make it in
during the Buster release freeze, that's probably the short-term
solution I would suggest.

So your choice --- we can either reassign this bug back to fastboot or
android-sdk-platforms-tools, or I can downgrade the severity of this
bug for e2fsprogs down to wishlist[1].  Let me know how you want to
handle this.

Cheers,

						- Ted

[1] This is because I view this both as a "feature request" and "bugs
that are very difficult to fix due to major design considerations"
(per https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities), not to mention
that it's going to affect a miniscule fraction of the e2fsprogs
package's users.


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