Re: Building for Android and F-Droid

["Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 7:33 AM, Hartmut Goebel
<h.goebel@goebel-consult.de> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I just want to share an idea I had:
>
> Recently I was involved in packaging a app for f-droid. The f-droid build
> system consists of 1) a virtual machine which get cleaned up after each
> build. and 2) meta-data descriptions of each package. The meta-data includes
> build instructions and is basically a ini-like file. For a simple examples
> see [1] and for a complex one see [2].
>
> One of f-droid's goals is reproducible build. De-facto they fail on this,
> given the current set up since they update the virtual machine to some
> current state.
>
> In got the idea to make f-droid use guix as a base. Of course, this would be
> a lot of work, and I do not expect this to happen any time soon. We have
> quite a lot of work to do on the guix-side, like building the Android tools,
> implement maven and graddle builds, etc.

You are indeed correct that it would be a lot of work, but it is
certainly possible and sounds like it would be a big improvement over
the status quo.  I would also like to see this happen because I am an
F-Droid user.

Does anyone know what we are missing to be able to package android
tools?  I would like to be able to use the android debug bridge again
to shell into my phone. :)

- Dave