From: Jonathan Gordon <jdgordy_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:20:05 +1000

Hi all,
Firstly, yes I'm jumping the gun a bit here, but because GSoC is
pretty much finished and the android port seems to be almost on par
with other touchscreen targets I thought we better have this
discussion.

The test builds Thomas has been building are built with a single
librockbox.so which is for a single screen size. This file is about
800kb and is very hard to update (impossible even?) without rebuilding
the whole apk. If we continue with this method then we either need to
setup an apk for each lcd size (yuck) or we build a separate
librockbox.so for each lcd size and have only the needed one loaded
(but all will be in the apk). This of course means a couple of MB
which isn't much but most people have very tight mobile data
allowances.

The other problem with this is when it comes time to do an update the
whole thing needs to be downloaded again. Do we want android to be the
only target which cant run the svn builds and users are forced to only
use the builds we push to the market (or make available on the site).

The other option is not building the librockbox.so into the apk at all
but instead download it on first run, or try to load rockbox.zip from
the sdcard. This allows the user to use whichever build they want, it
means it can be integrated into the build system more simply, and we
only ever need to update the .apk when the java changes (or we use
that to try to force users onto the new releases).

http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/11525 does this in a mostly
working way. It asks if you want to download (which isnt implemented
yet) or update if rockbox.zip is found in /sdcard/rockbox on first run
(I want to make it check on every resume of the activity for a new
rockbox.zip but I'm not having any luck restarting the service/rockbox
thread).

(The reason I wanted to talk about this before anything is officially
released is that my patch changes paths and from a users POV having
rockbox waste 10MB because the old paths don't get cleaned up is not
very nice).


Jonathan
Received on 2010-08-11