[Python-Dev] Support of the Android platform

[Xavier de Gaye]

On 12/11/2017 12:56 PM, Victor Stinner wrote:
 > 2017-12-10 15:19 GMT+01:00 Xavier de Gaye <xdegaye at gmail.com>:
 >> * Given the cpu resources required to run the test suite on the arm
 >> emulators,
 >>    it may be difficult to find a contributed buildbot worker. So it remains
 >> to
 >>    find the hardware to run these buildbots.
 >
 > Do you have the hardware to host such worker? Or are you looking for a
 > host somewhere? Which kind of hardware are you looking for? CPU,
 > memory, network bandwidth, etc.

I cannot host the buildbots or any buildbot for that matter. I can maintain them.

The host running the buildbots must be able to run 6 (i.e. 3 x (version 3.x + maintenance version)) emulators simultaneously, so with an eight core cpu, that will be 6 cores running at 100%. The armv7 
and arm64 buildbot may be set to run only daily but the tests last a long time on these architectures anyway.


 >> *API 24*
 >>    * API 21 is the first version to provide usable support for wide
 >> characters
 >>      and where SELinux is run in enforcing mode.
 >
 > Some people are looking for API 19 support. Would it be doable, or
 > would it require too many changes? I know that people are running
 > heavily patched Python 2.7 and 3.5 on Android with API 19.
 >
 > I'm not asking for a "full support" for API 19, but more if it would
 > be possible to get a "best effort" level of support, like accept
 > patches if someone writes them.

Not sure that python can be built on API 19. What I remember about API 19 at the time I started this project, is that wide characters support is not usable.
If you look at the Android version history [1] on Wikipedia referred to in my initial post, the Kit Kat (API 19) share is 16 % now and will probably be 8 % next year. Another point to consider is that 
working on a change specific to Android is tedious: the test case must be ok on the build platform and on the emulator. The emulator must be started and an installation made from scratch, and after 
few file modifications on the emulator there is no 'git status' command to tell exactly what change you are running and you must re-install from scratch. Is there a way to browse these patches to get 
a better idea of the changes involved ?

Xavier


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history