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

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Theodore Ts'o:
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2019 at 06:09:23PM +0200, Jonas Meurer wrote:
>> Hans-Christoph Steiner:
>>> Theodore Ts'o:
>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>> [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.
>>>
>>> Makes sense to me.  I'm fine with this being done post-Buster or as a
>>> custom mke2fs in android-platform-system-core.
>>
>> So the bottom line here is that the ext4 formatting support in fastboot
>> remains broken in Buster, right? That would be very unfortunate and a
>> regression compared to Stretch.
> 
> I'm not sure whether or not Stretch was using the old-style
> make_ext4fs from AOSP, or was including the mke2fs from AOSP, but yes,
> it sounds like it's a regression from stretch.  I'm not sure how many
> Debian users are using the Debian-native fastboot versus using the
> version from the Google SDK or the AOSP binaries, though.
> 
> It does seem that if this is considered high priority, the most
> straightforward way to address this bug is going to be to include
> building mke2fs from AOSP and placing it in
> /usr/lib/android-sdk/platform-tools/mke2fs.  I know some folks on the
> android tools teams aren't excited with that approach, but that
> probably is the best thing to do if you want to address this in
> Buster.

That approach sounds fine for buster.  The only question in my mind is
who will do the work...

I don't really know how fastboot in stretch provided the mke2fs support,
but judging by the dependencies, it might have been that fastboot used
to do the formatting itself, based on being linked to
android-libext4-utils and android-libsparse.  The buster version of
fastboot is clearly calling mk2efs, which in AOSP is built from an
inline e2fsprogs fork.

.hc