Vendor Module Owner Requirements

[Dave Smith]

Hi all -

I recently discovered that certain targets placed into a vendor/ product overlay are subject to specialized requirements where they must declare an "owner", which comes from a pre-defined whitelist: http://androidxref.com/5.1.1_r6/xref/build/core/tasks/vendor_module_check.mk

Things like PRODUCT_COPY_FILES or any custom module definition fail to add without the owner string. Can anyone explain to me what the intended purpose of this is? Beyond this enforced check at build time, I don't see anywhere that this value is really used. What are we trying to enforce here?

Cheers,

--

Dave Smith, PE

@devunwired

[Glenn Kasten]

Thanks for re-posting here (from android-platform).

I'll make an attempt to answer, and

hopefully more of the right people will be here to follow up with additions/corrections.

AOSP, as the name indicates, is a software distribution with appropriate open source license(s).

It does not include the vendor/... projects, which are generally not open source.

So, since AOSP is open source only, how did a reference to non-open source pathname

"leak" into it? I don't know. Fortunately it is benign; if you don't have or use vendor/... 

then the build system should still work fine as far as I can tell.

[Dave Smith]

Thanks Glenn!

Part of the hidden motivation for the question is for me to better define for myself the delineation between product/device/vendor. It's true that placing these files directly in the device/ tree circumvents the problem, so I'm trying to work out why someone would use the vendor/ tree for any particular use case. That's a good point that the vendor/ part of the tree is typically reserved for proprietary binaries. I'm mainly trying to figure out what the motivations are behind it, since it doesn't seem to really enforce anything in particular (anyone can say their module is owned by "moto", for example).

Cheers,

--

Dave Smith, PE

@devunwired