[Android-tools-devel] sdkmanager and future plans for supporting Google binary packages

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

The F-Droid reimplementation of _sdkmanager_ [0] is now in Debian!  This means 
that users now have an easy, documented way to get Google's Android SDK 
packages.  It also gives us a place to build a channel to help users move to 
free packages as they are available (e.g. https://gitlab.com/android-rebuilds).

The "google-android-*" packages [1] were an early way to get some pieces of the 
Android SDK into Debian.  They are contrib because they download and install 
Google's binaries.  My feeling is that we as a team don't want to expand this 
approach, and want to use it only for limited cases where it provides value over 
sdkmanager.

One example of a use case is for non-technical people to use the Android 
emulator.  It should be possible to use the Android emulator only by installing 
a package.  Things like the versioned "platforms", NDK, old build-tools 
releases, and emulator system images are just much better managed from 
_sdkmanager_.  It might make sense to have one NDK in Debian built from source.

[0] https://salsa.debian.org/python-team/packages/sdkmanager
[1] https://salsa.debian.org/android-tools-team/google-android-installers