Re: NDK from AOSP/master on OS X issues

[David Turner]

Hello,

First, sorry for your troubles,

The first issue seems to be a bug. We don't package the darwin NDK on OS X anymore, instead we launch the build from Linux, and use the --darwin-ssh=<hostname> option to build only the host NDK binaries on a remote machine. I guess that's why this change to make-release.sh wasn't tested properly. It should be easy to fix though.

The second issue is stranger to me. The "generate-file-dir" improvement has been written specifically to ensure that directories containing each object file are only created once per build. This is in contrast to NDK r8b and before, which performed a forced "mkdir -p <dirname>" for every object file being built. The directories themselves should only be touched/created if they don't already exist.

I can't reproduce the problem on Linux, I'll have to check on an OS X machine.

Thanks for reporting this.

- David

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 12:28 AM, Romain Tisserand <romain.t...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

That's my first post here so let's I don't get flamed for telling something stupid :)

If anybody from Google working on the NDK could read this and give feedback, it would be great.

We use Android NDK a lot at my company (DotEmu SAS, a French videogame company) and I decided to build my own from AOSP master for many reasons (mostly critical bugfixes we need for our projects). I tried to build NDK from AOSP master branch, from 2012-11-07, on OS X Lion 10.7.5. XCode 4.5.2 installed with command-line tools, and environment setup as AOSP guidelines require it.

I ran into two major issues :

1. Building the NDK itself

Without adding --systems=darwin-x86 it to make-release.sh command line the build fails. Still, the documentation says it should be the default on OS X (which makes a lot of sense). Still, after scratching my head a bit, I discovered the switch was being filtered by make-release.sh itself by this line :

HOST_SYSTEMS_FLAGS=$(echo "$HOST_SYSTEMS_FLAGS" | sed -e 's/darwin-x86//')

I had to comment it to get the NDK compiling fine.

After a good sleep, I had a nice tar.bz2 file containing my NDK, which was building our projects quite well. Then comes the second and most problematic issue.

2. My NDK keeps rebuilding all files at each build, even untouched

It took me a while to figure out why, but the reason was in fact each directory being "touched" by the OS, therefore bringing a timestamp later than my source files. So GNU make complains for each file it's out of date due to the timestamp its own directory being later than the file itself.

I had a deep look between r8b (working fine) and master, and discovered a lot of changes were done in directory handling, especially regarding host-mkdir command. I finally managed to tweak it to work as it should, namely rebuilding only changed files between to builds, and all files if I request a clean. Please find attached a (dirty) patch which is mostly a rollback to r8b system.

I am aware this is not going to be merged in AOSP but I would love to understand what's going "under the hood" and why I had to make such a dirty hack.

Looking forward from feedback :)

Thanks,

Romain Tisserand

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[David Turner]

I could reproduce the bug on Linux, and am working on a solution. See http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=39810 for details.

Sorry about the annoyance. I hope we'll be able to release the fix shortly.

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Romain Tisserand <romain.t...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello David,

Thank you for your feedback and explanation.

My various OSX setups at work and home have various MacPorts binaries installed, I thought that would be wise to add.

Maybe some of them, since in the path, is conflicting with the new generate-file-dir behaviour.

Will try on a virgin OSX 10.8 install and try to reproduce the issue using ndk-r8c.

Romain

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/android-ndk/-/KxB-MXjsoMEJ.

[Luke Weber]

Applying the patch simply to the new ndk-r8c did seem to fix things
for anyone who's stuck.

Wanted to get clang compiling and in the end I noticed it dropped my
release binary size by about 30% so win-win.

The following diff applies cleanly to the ndk, the above you need to
fuzz it a bit and apply one section manually.