Re: [Chicken-users] Playing with build utilities for Android

[Peter Bex]

On Fri, Jan 03, 2014 at 01:44:41AM +0100, Kristian Lein-Mathisen wrote:
> Hi folks,
> and happy new year to all!
> 
> I have been playing around with some simple build utilities to get Chicken
> onto my Android phone (again!).

Hello Kristian,

Very cool!  Thanks for your continued work in this area.  Hopefuly we
can get a *convenient* Android build from all this.

> The fine work <https://github.com/chicken-mobile/android-chicken> by Bevuta
> allows us to build a cross-chicken which can cross-compile eggs and the
> Chicken runtime.

But it's not a true cross-compiler, is it?  As I understood it, the
Android Makefile from Bevuta just cross-compiles CHICKEN itself, 
completely, rather than providing a working csc on the host platform
which generates executables for the target platform.

> This is great, but I always spend a lot of time going from
> there to getting a Chicken ecosystem running on my app, with eggs and a
> repl. So I've played around with automating parts of that and integrating
> it with ndk-build.

I was hoping someone would do something like that.  It's the natural
next step, and would simplify building for all these stupid different
supported architectures.

> What I've accomplished so far is basically fewer manual steps when starting
> a new Chicken app:
> 
> - autodetect package name and android platform when building cross-chicken
> (no config-file editing which I always get wrong)
> - provide an ndk module for chicken that your jni/main.c can depend on
> - make the eggs and unit survive through installation (harder than you
> think!)

Have you considered simply filing a bugreport for the Android NDK?
I think the requirement that all .so files must be prefixed with 'lib'
is pretty bogus.  Hopefully if they do fix it this will be on the NDK
side, and it could be used even for older devices.

Thanks again!

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://www.more-magic.net