[BRLTTY] Compiling BRLTTY for Android on Windows

[Robert Pösel]

Hi,

from your reply I feel some defensive attitude, so I assure you my 
message wasn't intended to push you into something. It was more like 
sharing my experience from trying to build on Windows and ideas that 
might help with that.

Dne 08.03.2018 v 16:50 Dave Mielke napsal(a):
> Simply changing brltty to build with cmake would be a bad idea because that's a
> Windows-specific tool. We need to build brltty on others platforms, not the
> laast of which is Linux., and I don't really want to have more than one way to
> do it.
Well, I understand CMake as a multiplatform tool, definitely not a 
Windows-specific tool. On CMake about page (https://cmake.org/overview/) 
they say:
/
"CMake is an extensible, open-source system that manages the build 
process in an operating system and in a compiler-independent manner. 
Unlike many cross-platform systems, CMake is designed to be used in 
conjunction with the native build environment. Simple configuration 
files placed in each source directory (called CMakeLists.txt files) are 
used to generate standard build files (e.g., makefiles on Unix and 
projects/workspaces in Windows MSVC) which are used in the usual way. (...)"
/
I saw various multiplatform projects using CMake and also on their 
website they mention projects like MySQL or KDE are using it too. Since 
it's so popular and makes building multiplatform projects much easier, I 
////wanted to know whether you thought about it. I understand that when 
something works it's better to keep it that way and don't change things 
without proper reason.

> The only way I'd consider accommodating cmake is if we could convince autoconf
> to get it right.
As I understand it, CMake is an alternative to autoconf, so I think it 
doesn't make sense to use both of them at the same time anyway.

> One reason you had difficulty building brltty is because you included brltty.c,
> which means that you tried to make an executable. That, of course, makes no
> sense on Android. If cfg-android has successfully run then all you need to do
> for the core part is to make the two needed shared objects: libbrltty_core.so,
> and libbrltty_jni.so.
I see, can you please tell me where can I find list of source files from 
which is libbrltty_core.so compiled?

> We build with ant because it works. I don't personally see any need to convert
> to using gradle because we build brltty with older tools since it runs all the
> way back to ICS (4.0).
Google maintains backward compatibility with older Android versions, so 
you don't need to use older build tools to support older Android 
versions. You can use latest version of SDK / build tools and still keep 
BRLTTY app working on Android 4.0 (by setting minSdkVersion value).
On the other hand, using old SDK / build tools might cause problems on 
newer Android versions, as we've seen with the "native text relocations" 
error recently.

Google previously used Eclipse as main IDE and Ant as build system. Few 
years ago they created Android Studio and since then they use Gradle as 
build system. With Gradle it is easier and also more powerful to build 
Android projects.  And as I mentioned in last e-mail, they even removed 
the Ant build scripts from SDK last year, so they expect everyone 
switching to Gradle eventually. For building native code via NDK they 
use CMake - Gradle will run that CMake script to compile and get 
binaries which then Gradle builds into resulting APK. That's why I 
mentioned that (from this point of view) it would be best if whole 
BRLTTY would use CMake too (but I'm not saying it should).

> The android command is part of the Android SDK.The directory it's in needs to
> be in your command search path.
Yes, that error message came from the /android/ command itself, because 
support for that parameter was removed in recent build tools (same as 
they removed the Ant scripts). In older SDK version that command works.

> My question is: Rather than introduce a bunch of needless and
> unwanted turbulence into our way of building, why not just install a Linux VM
> on Windows and do it our way?
Because since I already spent some time trying to make it work, I 
thought that finishing it and finding working solution for building on 
Windows would also help others who may want to do the same thing in the 
future.

> I'd much rather invest my time and effort into solving real problems,
> and also would rather devote a chunk of it to my personal life (family, etc).
I understand that and I appreciate your time you invest in BRLTTY and in 
this conversation.

Robert
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