Re: [GSoC] Introduction and Project Discussion
Hey Chirayu,
Chirayu Desai:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I am a first year student doing computer engineering at the Silver Oak
> College of Engineering and Technology, Ahmedabad.
> I am interested in working on the project "Android SDK Tools in Debian".
>
> I have worked with Android in the past (and still do), in fact android
> is what got me into development and OSS. I am a CyanogenMod device
> maintainer, and I currently maintain most of the supported Sony
> devices. I have been involved with that project since 2012. As a
> result, I'm somewhat familiar with the android source code and build
> system, and while I have not worked too much with the SDK, I believe
> my past experience will help a lot in learning that.
Sounds like you have enough relevant experience, the tools for building
a ROM are basically the same as for building the SDK. How much have you
worked with Debian or a derivative (Ubuntu, Mint, etc)? Have you ever
done any packaging for Debian or any other distro (even cygwin or homebrew)?
> Below lines copy-pasted from [1] for inline comments.
>
>> finish packaging all of the core development tools (lint, gradle-plugin, SDK Manager, etc.)
> After reading the AndoidTools wiki page [2], it looks like there has
> been work to fork the relevant android projects into debian for
> getting the SDK part build, I can continue with that.
>
>> update android-tools and relevant pkg-java packages to the latest upstream version
> The source already seems to be close to the latest, if not the latest
> (6.0.1r16, there is a r22 now which does have significant changes from
> r16)
>
>> update androidsdk-tools to the Android Tools Team style, and update to latest upstream version
> The current version is r22, which would correspond to Android 5.1
> Lollipop (API 22)
> The latest is r23, which corresponds to Android 6.0 Marshmallow (API 23)
> As for the Android Tools Team style, I take it to mean
The versions in the Android SDK are super confusing. See the section in
the AndroidTools wiki about them. the r22 here, is not like the
android-22. It is actually like this: 6.0.1_r16 is like 6.0.1.16, and
6.0.1_r22 would be 6.0.1.22.
>> package new parts of the Android upstream source, including the NDK, target platforms, emulators, Android Studio, etc.
> This would involve more repositories being pulled under android-tools/
> It would be made easier by the fact that the NDK is less coupled with
> the build system than other tools, and there is also a repo manifest
> to build only the NDK - which doesn't fetch too many repos, especially
> if you don't count the prebuilt toolchains [3]
Since Debian always builds everything from source, the prebuilts will
count too. Unfortunately, those can be harder...
>> make all Android Tools packages build reproducibly
> I would look at the debian-reproducible project first, and see what
> they have done to make the building of any similar packages
> reproducible.
> Apart from that, I also saw some patches Google did to make the
> android build reproducible, and I believe we could use at least parts
> of that. [4], [5] are a few, and I remember seeing more / followup
> patches too. The point being that given Google is working on this too,
> we can expect to benefit from that work by taking what's committed in
> master, and more might also probably be available in future releases
> (N, after that..)
The good news is that almost all of the SDK packages in Debian are
already building reproducibly. Its also nice to see that the Android
team is working on this themselves. So I don't expect it will take much
work on our part to make sure our packages are building reproducibly.
>> improve package build systems to be more tightly integrated with upstream build systems
> One thing to consider with this is that the upstream in this case
> (android) is undergoing an effort to change build systems, moving from
> plain makefiles to ninja generated makefiles (soong), with a stop-gap
> system (kati) in between. See [6]
That is good to know, thanks for that info! Maybe this will give us a
better integration point for our work.
>> add Continuous Integration tests
> This could involve the android emulator in some way, try to build a
> few sample apps with the SDK and see if they work.
> Could also use some tests from the android CTS[7] for this.
Using CTS tests could be good. I find that running tests in an emulator
can be quite brittle, and require lots of maintenance. I think we can
start with tests that just build and run things as part of the build
process, and see how far that gets us.
>> package and improve related tools, like apktool, androguard, fdroidserver, drozer, etc.
> Doable, probably much easier as they would likely be independent tools
> then be something so tightly coupled as android.
>
> Overall, I view this as a good challenge for me, given this is a part
> of android I haven't worked too much with before. And that too for
> debian, which is something I've only used.
> It would be a great experience for me to be able to work with the
> debian project, and contribute with the help of the android knowledge
> I've gained over the years.
>
> I'll upload a draft proposal to Google's site if the above looks okay
> to you guys.
Yes, sounds good, please upload a proposal!
.hc
> Thanks and Regards,
> Chirayu Desai
>
> [1]: https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2016/Projects
> [2]: https://wiki.debian.org/AndroidTools
> [3]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest/+/master-ndk/default.xml
> [4]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/build/+/6a66a887baadc9eb3d0d60e26f748b8453e27a02
> [5]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/build/+/d75d893da8f97a5c7781142aaa7a16cf1dbb669c
> [6]: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/android-platform/Hhl_4hfOONg/discussion
> [7]: http://source.android.com/compatibility/cts/index.html
>
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