[gentoo-dev] Introducing SharkBait: Gentoo GSoC 2018 project to manage Android with Portage

[Pengcheng Xu]

Dear all,

I'm Pengcheng Xu, one of the participants in Gentoo Google Summer of
Code 2018, with Benda (heroxbd) Xu as my mentor.  I've been
working on the project SharkBait [1] (previously known as
Portage-powered Android), which aims to manage the build and update
process of Android systems with Portage.  Development details can be
found on my personal blog [2].

I've recently delivered a talk on the Software Freedom Day event at
Tsinghua University, China on September 22nd about the SharkBait
project. The talk slides are attached and should serve as a concise
introduction.

We've finished booting Android in LXC while having OpenRC as the
service manager for the rest of the system.  Work to build Android
components with Portage has started, and we have successfully built
bionic (Android's libc) with Portage on amd64, but there are a few
issues left on ARM.

If you're interested, follow the porting guide at [3] to get started
with your Android device.  The slides contain a slightly more detailed
overview of porting a device, while the wiki page holds all the
details to get a port up and running.

We're planning to implement an eclass for Soong, the AOSP build
system, and develop mechanisms to automatically convert Soong metadata
to ebuilds.  We may have to figure out how to build Java parts of
Android (gradle mostly) elegantly with Portage.  In this way, we can
achieve the final goal of the project, that is, to manage Android
update process with Portage.

I've always been looking forward to responses from Gentoo developers,
so please tell me what you think about the project as well as
questions.  Thanks!

[1]: https://www.shark-bait.org/
[2]: https://jsteward.moe/
[3]: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Android/SharkBait/Porter_Guide

Sincerely,
-- 
Pengcheng Xu
i@××××××××.moe