[Android-tools-devel] Fwd: google-android-platform-* packages WAS: android-platform-libcore/6.0.1+r16-1

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

I thought about enabling `android update sdk` in the Debian package's
version of `android`, but now I'm thinking that it would be better to do
it all with Debian packages.  I think a primary use case of the Debian
packages will be to set up a system to build Android apps in an
automated way (e.g. via Chef, Puppet, Ansible, CI script, etc).  It'll
be a lot easier to do that if all of the components of the SDK can be
directly `apt-get install`ed.  `android update sdk` is a really crappy
package manager, and I've spent quite a bit of time fighting with it
when automating things like CI builds.

I think it could make a lot of sense to have a single
google-android-platform-installer source package that then makes
multiple google-android-platform-*-installer binary pacakges for each
platform number.  It might even make sense to have a single source
package for all of these installer binary packages.  The source package
would just contain basically a template, then the build process would
generate lots of binary packages based on replacing things in the
template using a list of values for all of the Google binary packages
that we want to support, e.g.

* docs
* platform-*
* sys_img-*
* build-tools-*

.hc

Chirayu Desai:
> Hi,
> 
> This idea sounds good, and should make us able to have an android app
> building shortly.
> The "proper" SDK could come later, lots of work to do there still.
> 
> There's one thing which has discussed at DebConf (informal
> conversation at some random place) - what we could do is use the
> components we have building and working currently right now, and then
> grab the rest from google / use contrib packages. However, it might be
> tricky to combine files from multiple packages, I hadn't really
> thought about that before. Still putting this thought here, if it
> turns out to be helpful.
> 
> One more thing, do we want to have some sort of integration with the
> SDK Manager ('android' command) and debian packages? I.e., user can
> pick SDK platform 23 and get the platform package Mouaad created
> installed. If he picks emulator, he can get the emulator images
> downloaded directly from Google if they're not in a debian package. It
> would involve some code changes though, but I'm not sure exactly how
> much work would that be, and if it would be worth it to do that right
> now for the installer packages.
> It could still be useful later though, when we have platform packages
> built from source.
> And either way, part of this was discussed earlier as well, where the
> user should still be able to install his own packages / add custom
> stuff / install the missing packages from Google easily in a way that
> works with the existing debian packages.
> 
> I'm just getting back to work after the DebConf trip, lots of catching
> up to do - I did read all of the e-mails when there, just didn't get a
> chance to send a proper reply until today.
> 
> Regards,
> Chirayu Desai
> 
> On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 11:15 PM, Mouaad Aallam <mouaad at aallam.com> wrote:
>> A start package for Google Android SDK Platform 24[1]
>>
>> [1]: https://github.com/Aallam/debian_google-android-platform-24-installer
>>
>> Mouaad Aallam
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 4:29 PM, Mouaad Aallam <mouaad at aallam.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> This approach would make the packaging simpler, but I think we would
>>>> provide a much better experience to users who are installing the
>>>> platforms if there was one Debian package per platform package.  That's
>>>> how the platforms are represented using the `android list sdk` command
>>>> line tool, and the `android` GUI package installer.  That's what Android
>>>> devs are used to.
>>>>
>>>> I think it also provides a more Debian-ish experience, I need X so I do
>>>> `apt-get install X`.
>>>
>>>
>>> Alright then, that was just an idea I had :D, let's do it the way you just
>>> discribed then.
>>
>>
>>
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> 
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