At face value, the blog entry is responding to those on this list who have been asking for help adding Proguard to their build process.
Whether Proguard is worth the effort and expense (e.g, maintaining symbol maps for decoding stack dumps) is another matter. Proguard can significantly compact and to a lesser extent optimize the app, which can be helpful in some situations. Proguard can also obfuscate to some extent, which will impede anyone trying to reconstitute the app -- but, it should be stressed, will not by any stretch of the imagination prevent them. If you don't need to trim bytes, inline methods, or impede piracy, you need never address the beast. Joe On Sep 22, 9:59 pm, JP <[email protected]> wrote: > Just read the latest Android Developer blog > post.http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/09/proguard-android-and-l... > Quite the beast. And Proguard cannot even be used with confidence > ("it’s still possible that in edge cases you’ll end up seeing > something like a ClassNotFoundException"). > > Is it just me getting irritated where this seems to be going? > In my more active days developing, pretty graphic slang was applies to > efforts like this: "Turd layering". Meaning: More dependencies, more > procedure, more sources of error, and it doesn't even work "right". In > of itself, adding innocent looking steps to a release procedure (for > some relatively obscure benefit) might be marginally worthwhile, but > in the bigger picture, releasing an app increasingly becomes a burden. > Dare you miss a step. Or try to teach somebody else how to go through > a release and verify it. Or you want to go and rebuild a development > environment. Or lose the ominous reference file (mapping.txt)... > > Anybody care to disagree and convince me this all nice and dandy and > we don't have to literally run for the hills? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
