porting gnupg to Android, is pth required?

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at guardianproject.info
Thu Jan 26 21:35:15 CET 2012


Werner Koch <wk at gnupg.org> writes:
> On Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:41, simon at josefsson.org said:
> 
>> The error messages suggests it is the former, you need to integrate
>> gnulib in the documented way otherwise there will be many strange
>> compiler errors.  I don't recall any significant discussions involving
>  
> Well, the included gnulib stuff is pretty old and has been modified.
> For example to support Windows CE.  The only really requirement we had
> was support for setenv.  That pulled in a lot of other stuff.
> 
> The problem with gnulib is, it defines a complete new build environment
> which often does not work well with existing code.  GnuPG has its own OS
> abstraction layer and thus the use of gnulib is not easy.  gnulib is
> designed as an extension to Posix to lift it up to a glibc feature
> level.  GnuPG is not designed to build against glibc but towards Posix
> 2001 and W32.  Other related applications (e.g. GPA) build against glib
> - which is again a different environment.
> 
> My conclusion is that we can't switch to gnulib nor to glib without
> breaking a lot of code.  Fixing the few problems with the Android libc
> should be easy compared to the changes required to support W32CE or VMS.

So unfortunately, the Android gnulib porting effort didn't go very far.
And it still doesn't build.  It seems like this is currently a deal
breaker for gnupg on Android since there doesn't seem to be interest in
the gnulib maintainers in fixing it for Android, and gnupg's include
gnulib is a custom version, so the upstream fixes might not even apply
to gnupg.

What is the next step?

.hc



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