Re: Android environments

[Po Lu]

Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> writes:

> I see. There are two ways to build C programs for Android:
>
>   (A) The way it is designed by Google: With the Android NDK,
>       that includes a cross-compiler. For the runtime, use an emulator
>       (based on qemu) or a physical connection to a real device.
>
>   (B) Inside a terminal emulator app (Termux [1][2] for Android ≥ 7,
>       Terminal-IDE [3] for Android < 5).
>
> (A) is a POSIX-like environment only at the C level; it has no shell and no
> utilities.
>
> (B) is a POSIX-like environment including shell and utilities.
>
> For building a real app, the approach (A) is what one needs.
>
> But for building and testing a library, the approach (B) provides
>   - an environment that allows to reuse build infrastructure (configure etc.)
>     from GNU,
>   - faster turnaround cycles.
>
> For Gnulib, we have only used approach (B). We *hope* that the resulting
> source code will also work well in situation (A). But when you hit a problem
> in situation (A), you are on your own. Because I won't install an NDK and
> get into the complexities of cross-compilation, APK packaging, and so on.
>
>> > Again, what is the Android API level that you are using?
>> 19.
>
> This is supported with Gnulib, as I have done a lot of testing with Android 
> 4.3
> (API level 18).

Thanks for explaining the situation.  Emacs will definitely be a
category "A" program, so I hope it will help improve gnulib's support
for those environments.