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...@jsteward.moe
