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

Thu Dec 29 16:20:02 UTC 2016

Hans-Christoph Steiner writes:

> Wolfgang Wiedmeyer:
>> Hi 殷啟聰,
>> 
>> 殷啟聰 writes:
>> 
>>> Hi Wolfgang,
>>>
>>> Sorry for my very late reply!
>>>
>>> I haven't started the packaging of Jack until recently. The packaging
>>> is still not finished and the code can be found at [1], in case you
>>> are interested. My package is based on ub-jack-douarn-b8, and AOSP
>>> 7.0.0 has been using ub-jack-douarn-a8, so I think it is stable
>>> enough, though I haven't tested it.
>> 
>> Thanks for working on this! Have you verified that the jar file in AOSP
>> 7.0.0 was build using ub-jack-douarn-a8? As I already wrote in my first
>> mail, I found the sha hash of the commit in the version.properties file
>> in the jar. The commit was not tagged and there was otherwise no hint
>> that this commit would be used for the binary. This was on the
>> ub-jack-brest branch and the commit was a few commits after the commit
>> that did the version bump to 1.1-mr2. If I had not found the hash, I
>> probably would have given up, because other versions were too unstable
>> to build Replicant.
>> 
>> I noticed that code that put the hash there is gone for ub-jack-douarn:
>> https://android.googlesource.com/toolchain/jack/+/44df9f39a03d5045c5ee2da40ff876337ecb818c%5E!/#F0
>> I don't know if there's a different way to be sure that the binary is
>> coming from a certain commit/tag.
>> 
>>> 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

> .hc
>
>
>> Best regards,
>> Wolfgang
>> 
>>> For now NDK is too big for us, your work on building NDK from source
>>> will definitely us!
>>>
>>> [1]: https://gitlab.com/seamlik/debianpkg_android-toolchain-jack
>>>
>>> 2016-09-05 20:35 GMT+08:00 Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at>:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Wolfgang Wiedmeyer:
>>>>>
>>>>> Hans-Christoph Steiner writes:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Wolfgang Wiedmeyer:
>>>>>>> Sorry for my late reply!
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Hans-Christoph Steiner writes:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> We're interested in packaging as much of the Android tools as possible,
>>>>>>>> we'd also be interested in the manifest-merger.  We have manifest-merger
>>>>>>>> built as a JAR in the android-platform-tools-base package, but we
>>>>>>>> haven't really exposed it.  You can see it listed here:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> https://packages.debian.org/stretch/all/android-platform-tools-base/filelist
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Awesome! Are there any plans to do a backport to Jessie?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> If you are interested in basing your ROM builds on Debian, then we can
>>>>>>>> shift priorities some to work on fixing issues related to ROM builds.
>>>>>>>> We're currently focused on getting app building working with the Debian
>>>>>>>> packages.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I'm very interested in that and I already try to use everything that is
>>>>>>> available in Jessie. It would be great to have all host tools either
>>>>>>> build from source as part of Replicant or getting them from Jessie. I'm
>>>>>>> already pretty close to that. In fact, I'm only aware of the
>>>>>>> manifest-merger and some binaries from the NDK repo that run on the
>>>>>>> build host and are not yet from Jessie or build from source. This is for
>>>>>>> building a ROM image, to build the SDK a lot more is needed. I'm
>>>>>>> focusing on the host tools for now to make the build itself more
>>>>>>> trustworthy, but the goal is to get rid of all the prebuilts.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Replicant needs to be buildable on a GNU FSDG-compliant
>>>>>>> distribution. While I think it's fine that my focus is currently on
>>>>>>> Debian, it should be possible to build it on a FSDG-compliant distro
>>>>>>> like Trisquel in the future. A dependence on the backports repo could
>>>>>>> make this more difficult, but I don't see an other option at the moment.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>>> Wolfgang
>>>>>>
>>>>>> We're still focused on getting everything working in testing.  Backport
>>>>>> to jessie is feasible, but its a chunk of work.  How essential is it for
>>>>>> you?  It would make the workflow a lot easier if you work on stretch,
>>>>>> since we can then make updates and fixes in one place.
>>>>>
>>>>> Stretch is not really an option right now. I'm already mirroring all the
>>>>> repos from CyanogenMod to have everything in a "freezed" state. A
>>>>> running target like Stretch would result in a lot of additional work to
>>>>> keep up with the changes. Google seems to target an older Ubuntu LTS
>>>>> release for building their native toolchain (compilers etc.). Debian
>>>>> Stable is a much better fit for that. I already tried to help someone to
>>>>> get everything build on Stretch until this person gave up. There were
>>>>> quite some new build errors.
>>>>>
>>>>> Maybe this is something where I could get involved? I backport a few
>>>>> things for personal use: https://packages.fossencdi.org/
>>>>> I could do some quick and dirty backports of needed packages and see how it works
>>>>> out. Then, with your help and Debian Mentors, I could try to get them in
>>>>> the official backports repos.
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, that would certainly help.  The painful part is the staged
>>>> uploads, meaning that you first have to upload a partial version of
>>>> android-platform-build and android-platform-system-core, then upload
>>>> other things that depend on those, then upload the full versions.
>>>> That's because of circular dependencies between the git repos/source
>>>> packages.
>>>>
>>>> https://wiki.debian.org/AndroidTools#Updating_the_source_packages
>>>>
>>>> I propose a much easier way to use the android-tools packages from
>>>> stretch: add testing as a package source, but pin it at very low
>>>> priority so you have to manually install packages from that repo.   This
>>>> is the same setup as jessie-backports.  Then you can start working with
>>>> the stretch versions of the packages while on jessie.  I think the 7.0
>>>> SDK packages will be easier to backport since there is only one circular
>>>> dep: android-platform-system-core.  We're aiming to have those included
>>>> in stretch's final release.
>>>>
>>>> Also, FYI, stretch will freeze in November, so it will be soon not
>>>> changing very much.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>> We already have the bulk of the SDK tools packaged.  Its really just the
>>>>>> odd things like renderscript that are not.  As for building the NDK from
>>>>>> source, that's a whole other question.  It would probably be pretty easy
>>>>>> to package ndk-build since its just a collection of Make scripts.  But
>>>>>> actually building the compilers would be a large project.
>>>>>
>>>>> Building the compilers works fine, but some binaries like a minimal
>>>>> Android libc is needed. I also have to check what else is needed for
>>>>> building a ROM, but it doesn't seem to be much.
>>>>>
>>>>> Wolfgang
>>>>
>>>> Ok, at least its easy to build.  There are still a lot of issues related
>>>> to the packaging and integrating with the compilers already in Debian.
>>>>
>>>> .hc
>>>>
>> 
>> 

-- 
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