Hi all, some of you might already have noticed that I was spouting my opinion about how it's not worth working on a Replicant 6.0 SDK over the last months[1][2]. But we never had a final verdict among Paul, Denis and me or the community as a whole about this. I think we should decide if it should still be a priority to create a SDK or if it should be something that someone can create if they feel to, but it's not a goal that is actively pursued by the project.
I will summarize my reasoning again below why I don't think that it's worth it to work on this. I just like to have the decision on this before the Replicant 6.0 release, so this can be addressed in the release blog post. It might even warrant its own blog post and I would prefer to do a dedicated post about it if we agree on my proposal. The Android SDK is packaged in Debian, even the same API as the Replicant 6.0 SDK would have. Debian even has build tools packaged that are not available in the SDK, like gradle or the gradle plugin. Some advantages of the Debian Android SDK over a Replicant 6.0 SDK: * properly build from source without relying on Google's prebuilt binaries * build is reproducible * only an "apt-get install android-sdk" away * Debian developers actively work on packaging more target APIs, something we basically can't do * Debian Android SDK is exposed to a lot more users and has more developers, so there will be less bugs and they are fixed a lot faster * Debian developers have packaged or are packaging more tools and libraries that would not be available in a Replicant 6.0 SDK So my proposition is to not work on a Replicant 6.0 SDK, but to get the Debian Android SDK into more distributions, especially GNU FSDG-compliant ones. A blog post could address this and encourage users, that are interested in a Replicant 6.0 SDK, to work with the developers of the distro they are using to get the Debian Android SDK packaged in their distro. If we agree on this strategy, it would be good to clarify some of the things below before writing a blog post, so we can provide more specific instructions on how this goal can be reached. Is it correct that Trisquel and Parabola are the most popular FSDG-compliant distros? It looks like the next release of Trisquel (8.0 Flidas) will be based on Ubuntu 16.04. Ubuntu 16.04 has the android-sdk packaged[3], but it's not complete as some packages didn't make it in time. android-sdk-platform-23 which is the actual target platform is only in Zesty (17.04)[4]. Are there some Trisquel folks reading along that could chime in on this? Would it be possible to get the rest of the needed Android packages included in Flidas by backporting them from newer Ubuntu releases? Are there other procedures to get packages uploaded and included in a Trisquel release? The SDK will likely end up in Trisquel at some point in the future, but it will probably take a very long time without doing something about it now. Hans-Christoph Steiner from the Debian Android Tools team addresses uploading to other distros in a mail[5]. I didn't yet see any efforts to get the SDK properly packaged in Arch Linux or in Parabola for that matter. Arch only seems to have packages that download the SDK from Google's servers without building it from source. Maybe some Parabola or Arch folks can comment on this? What would be the best strategy to get the packages into Arch? I guess if they are in Arch, they will show up in Parabola as well, at least eventually. Best regards, Wolfgang [1] http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/replicant/Week-of-Mon-20170320/001247.html [2] https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/android-tools-devel/2016q4/002316.html [3] http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/android-sdk [4] http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/libandroid-23-java [5] https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/android-tools-devel/2016q4/002325.html -- Website: https://fossencdi.org OpenPGP: 0F30 D1A0 2F73 F70A 6FEE 048E 5816 A24C 1075 7FC4 Key download: https://wiedmeyer.de/keys/ww.asc
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