[Toybox] Android binaries?

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Thu Aug 20 04:06:51 PDT 2020


You said way back when that you were thinking of putting up downloadable current
toybox android-built binaries somewhere. Did that ever happen?

I'm writing a "reporting bugs" FAQ entry because of the recent github thread.

I've also had a todo item to salvage todo entries I wrote for busybox forever
ago, especially since the busybox devs crapped all over the current versions.
For example,
https://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/docs/busybox.net/FAQ.html?h=95718b309169#n361
used to be project-agnostic (usable advice no matter what open source project
you were talking about), but in current https://busybox.net/FAQ.html#backporting
they've inserted a large digression in the middle about configuring busybox
source from the command line to make sure it doesn't apply to any other project
and can't be generally referenced as advice by other projects.

But anyway, the advice was "try to reproduce the bug on a current version before
poking the developers because there's a nonzero chance we already fixed it", and
for linux toybox I can point them at
https://landley.net/toybox/downloads/binaries for current versions (even if they
don't want to build it from source for their target)... but those are linked
against musl?

To check if it's been fixed on _android_, they need a bionic version. (I mean
the musl versions will run but all sorts of subtle behavior's different.) And
even if I build a bionic version with the NDK, that hasn't got all the libraries
the AOSP build uses. And the AOSP build here 1) takes FOREVER,  B) is random git
snapshot du jour, bundling one with MY releases doesn't sync up with YOUR
releases in any useful way and could be broken because of transient fluff du
jour, C) there's like 8 api levels for various previous releases still in use
that I have no idea how to beat out of current AOSP source anyway, D) me
distributing android binaries seems like a layering violation somehow. I do not
have the domain expertise to properly support or secure them beyond what I'm
already doing.

Anyway, just wondering...

Rob


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