[Python-Dev] Support of the Android platform

[Glenn Linderman]

On 12/15/2017 8:29 AM, Xavier de Gaye wrote:
> On 12/14/2017 02:59 PM, Victor Stinner wrote:
> > It seems like Android is evolving quickly, would say quicker than
> > Python releases. I'm asking if it's a good idea to put a recipe aside
> > the Python source code for one specific Android API version? Would it
> > still make sense to build for NDK v14 in 2 or 5 years?
>
> NDK 14 has been released in march 2017 and the latest release is NDK 
> 16. There are sometimes major changes between releases and I think it 
> is critical to ensure that the builds all use the same NDK release for 
> that reason. Supporting another NDK release is just a substitution in 
> one of the files of the build system and I am sure that in 2 or 5 
> years there would have been a core developer smart enough to make that 
> substitution (this could even have been me, I will only be 71 years 
> old in 5 years :-)). Anyway if this is a problem, this should have 
> been discussed in a review of the PR.
>
> There are concerns, including a concern raised by me, about supporting 
> Android with that build system or to supporting Android at all. It has 
> been interesting and gratifying to work on this build system and to 
> get the Python test suite running on Android without failures. Given 
> these concerns and the lack of interest in the support of Android it 
> is time for me to switch to something else, maybe improve the bdb 
> module, why not ?
>
> Xavier

I, for one, would love to see Android become a supported platform.

My understanding is that APIs are generally backward compatible, so that 
programs created with one API continue to work on future APIs... there 
may be new features they don't use and maybe can't support, because they 
don't know about newer APIs, but that is true of Windows and Linux and 
Mac also. It doesn't seem like it would be necessary to "support" or 
"release" an official Python for every new Android version, but it would 
be nice to have ongoing support for a recent version each time Python is 
released, if Xavier or someone can do it.  It is certainly a mainstream 
platform for development these days.

I see a variety of Python apps on Android, but I have no idea how well 
they work, or what their source is, or if they are supported, or what 
features of Python or its standard library might not be available, etc. 
I've been too busy on other projects to take time to investigate them.

Glenn
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