[guardian-dev] GP libraries and apps that will be impacted by Android L changes?

[Nathan of Guardian]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2014, at 10:27 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> 
> 
> Josh Steiner wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 4:47 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner
> > <hans at guardianproject.info> wrote:
> >>
> >> It would be worthwhile to see if this can be done without gradle.  There is no
> >> gradle setup on the build server, and gradle is very much a moving target,
> >> with incompatibilities between versions and no clean, easy way to install it,
> >> so its a lot of work to support it on a build server.
> > 
> > I think the gradle wrapper we ship in our project should handle off of
> > this for us.
> 
> I haven't tried gradle, but I've heard a lot about it from the FDroid
> team.
> It sounds like the gradle wrapper does not live up to its promise.
> 
> 
> >> I think gradle will only really help if we go the approach of building
> >> multiple APKs.  Having each APK include only the exact targeted platform
> >> (armeabi, armeabi-v7a, x86, mips, armeabi-PIE, armeabi-v7a-PIE, x86-PIE,
> >> mips-PIE) means that users cannot do FDroid swapping of that app unless the
> >> two people swapping have the exact same platform.
> > 
> > That's true, so maybe we need to make a giant build for fdroid, that's
> > just another build variant in the gradle config, it shouldn't be hard
> > to setup.
> 
> Its not just a matter of the APK that is uploaded to FDroid.  The point
> is to
> build up an ecosystem of sharing APKs, no matter where they got them from
> (as
> long as they are not malware).  So if there is a wide variety of
> different
> StoryMaker APKs out there, it'll only make it more confusing to users. 
> So
> either all native bits are embedded into the one official APK, or users
> are
> frequently not going to be able to share their APKs with other devices.

Since we are mostly concerned about ARM devices, maybe we could include
both non-PIE and PIE binaries in a single ARM APK build. I am content
with breaking sharing capabilities between ARM and MIPS or ARM and x86
for now. If we include all the native bits for all the possible
platforms, plus the PIE variants, our APKs will be so huge that no one
will be patient enough to install or share them anyhow!