[Toybox] [landley/toybox] Any plans to support extra utilities... (#35)

[enh]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 10:51 AM, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:

> People keep using github to try to communicate. This is
> https://github.com/landley/toybox/issues/35 which I'm replying to on the
> mailing list...
>
> > ...like Git, Ruby, or Python?
>
> git yes eventually (although starting with a read-only version capable
> of driving a repo checkout of the AOSP source for a build), but that's
> probably post-1.0.
>
> Ruby and Python: no. They're way out of scope.
>
> > I'd love to use Android as a real programming device someday.
>
> I just gave a talk about that at txlf, which was (as seems traditional
> for my txlf talks) far less coherent than I wanted it to be because my
> machine with the carefully loaded set of web pages I wanted to walk
> people through (some with sections mouse-highlighted, which is
> apparently preserved when you change tabs in chrome) couldn't talk to
> the darn projector (the magic resolution I didn't guess was 1280x1024,
> dunno why ubuntu 12.04 could autodetect this but 14.04 can't), and
> showing up early didn't help because the keynote before mine ran long so
> my talk started several minutes late anyway, and then fiddling with the
> monitor vs screen export stuff I accidentally hit function-f7 which
> disables the touchpad (there's a thing to do that?) and couldn't figure
> out how to switch it off again quickly, so I just borrowed a windows
> laptop with a web browser and improvised, pulling web pages up on the
> fly... meaning my talk wound up a bit like this paragraph, which I
> intentionally didn't edit to give an example of my main communications
> failure mode. :)
>
> > Sure, it may seem nonsensical to some, but I think making quick Git
> > commits or Ruby code on-the-go would be fantastic.
>
> Ruby is out of scope. Python is out of scope.
>
> Python isn't even one language anymore, they have one of those flag day
> changes from 2.0->3.0 the same way gtk breaks its API every few years
> and loses half its' developers each time. This time the retention
> failure is so bad python developers are blogging comparing the 2->3
> transition to the kubler-ross stages of grief. And no, I didn't make
> that up:
>
> https://lwn.net/Articles/669768/
>
> > Side note: nobody on Earth seems to care about cross-compiling
> > utilities to iOS/Android.
>
> I don't know what you mean by that, but my goal is to make native
> compling of arbitrary code on android work fine, possibly in some kind
> of posix container/chroot.
>

yeah, i think they're confused --- certainly anyone who works on platform
or third-party app native code would be very surprised to learn they
haven't been cross-compiling all this time :-)

assuming they mean the opposite, that no one cares about building
on-device, yeah, that's largely true. doesn't mean folks haven't done it
though, but it's mainly just for fun. i've built vim and gdb, and a guy in
the next office has built clang. i don't personally know of anyone who's
built make, but i'd imagine it's trivial given the things we have built.


> > The process is rather difficult though, and Stack Overflow is of no
> > help. Perhaps someone on this repository has a better understanding
> > of GCC/Clang than I do?
>
> I'm told Android is already using the llvm backend to convert java
> bytecode to native code (that's the "optimizing your apps 1/xxx" thing
> that pops up when you uprade), so adding the clang frontend to that
> isn't a huge step. The toolchain's already halfway there.
>

no, that was never really true, and i personally removed that failed
experiment over a year ago.

renderscript uses llvm, but renderscript's a lot more C-like.


> But it isn't _useful_ until i get a lot more toybox stuff in.
>
> My http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html project was a proof of
> concept about what's the smallest/simplest build environment that can
> not only rebuild itself from soruce code, but build linux from scratch
> under the result.
>
> I'm currently grinding through the "what's next" section of that page:
>
> http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#next
>
> That boils down to cleaning out the GPL code by replacing
> uclibc/busybox/glibc with llvm/toybox/musl (or a sufficiently upgraded
> bionic), and fixing the problem that distro builds always expect a very
> specific build environment and are full of assumptions. (I was poking at
> debian and fedora, but now I'm focusing on AOSP.)
>
> If I can get AOSP to build in an aboriginal chroot based on llvm,
> toybox, and musl (mostly by building its prerequisite packages first and
> setting up the environment it expects, but there will probably be some
> patches to AOSP itself), then getting AOSP to build under android is
> just a question of reproducing that known environment in the new context.
>

...and waiting several days :-)


> Python and Ruby aren't involved in this. Git is, due to AOSP's
> integration with repo.
>

although we do have several :-/ python prebuilts in AOSP, the build doesn't
actually use any of them right now. but it should, and then the python
problem goes away.


> Rob
> _______________________________________________
> Toybox mailing list
> Toybox at lists.landley.net
> http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net
>



-- 
Elliott Hughes - http://who/enh - http://jessies.org/~enh/
Android native code/tools questions? Mail me/drop by/add me as a reviewer.
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