Re: Android port

[Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> First, we need to decide whether we indeed want to have this in Emacs.
> Android is not a free platform, so when its support comes with a lot
> of additional non-trivial code that we'd need to understand and
> support/maintain (including a lot of Java), we had better discussed
> that first.

OK.  But to be fair, I had zero experience with Android development
myself before working on this; I have taken care to keep the Java code
as minimal as possible and comprehensible to C developers.

> If we do decide to have this, I'd definitely want more documentation
> of the internals and how they differ from the "traditional" platforms
> than you have there now, and preferably in one place, not scattered
> among the many source files, Makefile's, and READMEs.

Sure.  Please feel free to describe what you find confusing, and I will
try to document it in the README in the java directory.

> Then there are the design decisions you made: how to support windows
> and frames, how to handle the "task-killer" issues, how to handle the
> Android's access rights and privileges system, etc.

> For instance, I was quite surprised to see lack of support for scroll
> bars on account of them being "useless": I'm a happy user of an
> Android smartphone, and I use the scroll bars all the time.

I tried to find the scroll bars in a real (as in, not Emacs) Android
application, and could not find any at all.  The scroll bar in the
toolkit does not respond to input at all, and disappears after you
finish scrolling.  Besides, the Emacs scroll bar implementation I worked
on had major problems adapting to touch screen input.

> If we are to have a serious discussion of this, I'd encourage people
> to read the code of the branch and bring up issues here.

Yes, please do so.  Thanks.