Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo on Android stage3

[Benda Xu]

Hi Michael,

"M. J. Everitt" <m.j.everitt@×××.org> writes:

>> No SD slot on Nexus.  We will stress the internal NAND flash with
>> millions of ebuilds and rsync :)

> Completely out of my depth here, but can you cross-compile and

Ah, I was half-joking. Considering the recent advancement of NAND flash,
I expect it lasts longer than those 3 years ago.  Back in 2013, I used a
low-quality class 10 microSD card for development, rsync'ed over 500
times before the card showed some signs of failure.

So it is pretty safe to rsync, say, once a week.  Before it wears out,
the phone will be outdated or squashdelta becomes available.

cross-compile is possible, but not trivial.  After all, the goal of this
project is to develop on Android *natively in-situ*, exactly the same as
PC: no more SDK, no more cross-compiling and no more ROM-flashing. Just
use portage to compile kernels, build java apps and rolling release,
what do you say?

ROM-flashing a phone is equivalent to reinstalling the whole OS on a PC.
My laptop runs nearly 10 years without reinstallion (and surviving a
migration from HDD to SSD).  The software on mobile devices is far more
inflexible.  What the android world lacks is a damn good solid package
manager, Gentoo/portage/Prefix is one way to save this chaos.

> is there some way of leveraging the USB-C connection on the Nexus 6P
> .. or are we talking super-complex then?!

Oh yeah, you can attach a USB flash drive or even an HDD[0] via a USB
OTG[1] adapter.

> Will keep you posted about the Samsung .. will have a stab over the
> holiday period.

Great.  Looking forward to it.

Benda

0. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Asus_Transformer_Infinity_%28TF700T%29/Install#RAM_and_SWAP_considerations
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_On-The-Go