Any plans to support extra utilities...

[landley]

Any plans to support extra utilities...

[jcmdln]

@citrusui do you mean re-implement Git, Ruby, Python, etc? Sounds kind of... well, outside the scope of toybox.

[citrusui]

well, yes, it is out of scope, but it would be nice if toybox implemented some kind of "support" library or mechanism that let users easily add their own packages to toybox without dealing with the hassles of cross-compiling.

[jcmdln]

I'm having difficulties grasping why a coreutils implementation would need direct support for languages that are orders of magnitude larger than the project itself. At the moment I'm not sure how much integration is really needed since the utilities in toybox could be called from pretty much any other language; It seems that this is something that would be better handled in an alternate AOSP distribution that has these languages bundled (or by installing them into an existing Android device).

For example, there are apps for Android such as QPython which provides an interpreter, console, editor, and SL4A: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hipipal.qpyplus

Any chance you could elaborate more on what you're intending?

[citrusui]

Perhaps I'd just like to see someone provide consistently up-to-date version of various command line tools. The app you linked seems well made, but I am uncertain of which version of Python it provides. This poses many issues: compatibility, security, performance, etc. I want an executable of Python/Ruby/Git/whatever that is strictly command-line-based, and has instructions on how it was built (so I can update it to the current version, if I want)

See this issue, for example. No replies yet as I doubt any Android NDK developers, let alone authors of Ruby have seen my issue.

It would just be nice if I could contact Google themselves and get some tips on how to build stuff for Android.

[landley]

People keep using github to try to communicate. This is #35 which I'm replying to on the mailing list...

...like Git, Ruby, or Python?

git yes eventually (although starting with a read-only version capable of driving a repo checkout of the AOSP source for a build), but that's probably post-1.0. Ruby and Python: no. They're way out of scope.

I'd love to use Android as a real programming device someday.

I just gave a talk about that at txlf, which was (as seems traditional for my txlf talks) far less coherent than I wanted it to be because my machine with the carefully loaded set of web pages I wanted to walk people through (some with sections mouse-highlighted, which is apparently preserved when you change tabs in chrome) couldn't talk to the darn projector (the magic resolution I didn't guess was 1280x1024, dunno why ubuntu 12.04 could autodetect this but 14.04 can't), and showing up early didn't help because the keynote before mine ran long so my talk started several minutes late anyway, and then fiddling with the monitor vs screen export stuff I accidentally hit function-f7 which disables the touchpad (there's a thing to do that?) and couldn't figure out how to switch it off again quickly, so I just borrowed a windows laptop with a web browser and improvised, pulling web pages up on the fly... meaning my talk wound up a bit like this paragraph, which I intentionally didn't edit to give an example of my main communications failure mode. :)

Sure, it may seem nonsensical to some, but I think making quick Git commits or Ruby code on-the-go would be fantastic.

Ruby is out of scope. Python is out of scope. Python isn't even one language anymore, they have one of those flag day changes from 2.0->3.0 the same way gtk breaks its API every few years and loses half its' developers each time. This time the retention failure is so bad python developers are blogging comparing the 2->3 transition to the kubler-ross stages of grief. And no, I didn't make that up: https://lwn.net/Articles/669768/

Side note: nobody on Earth seems to care about cross-compiling utilities to iOS/Android.

I don't know what you mean by that, but my goal is to make native compling of arbitrary code on android work fine, possibly in some kind of posix container/chroot.

The process is rather difficult though, and Stack Overflow is of no help. Perhaps someone on this repository has a better understanding of GCC/Clang than I do?

I'm told Android is already using the llvm backend to convert java bytecode to native code (that's the "optimizing your apps 1/xxx" thing that pops up when you uprade), so adding the clang frontend to that isn't a huge step. The toolchain's already halfway there. But it isn't _useful_ until i get a lot more toybox stuff in. My http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html project was a proof of concept about what's the smallest/simplest build environment that can not only rebuild itself from soruce code, but build linux from scratch under the result. I'm currently grinding through the "what's next" section of that page: http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#next That boils down to cleaning out the GPL code by replacing uclibc/busybox/glibc with llvm/toybox/musl (or a sufficiently upgraded bionic), and fixing the problem that distro builds always expect a very specific build environment and are full of assumptions. (I was poking at debian and fedora, but now I'm focusing on AOSP.) If I can get AOSP to build in an aboriginal chroot based on llvm, toybox, and musl (mostly by building its prerequisite packages first and setting up the environment it expects, but there will probably be some patches to AOSP itself), then getting AOSP to build under android is just a question of reproducing that known environment in the new context. Python and Ruby aren't involved in this. Git is, due to AOSP's integration with repo. Rob

[citrusui]

I found a solution to my problems, anyway. termux-packages is exactly what I want.