[Python-ideas] Adding iOS/Android support to Python

[Russell Keith-Magee]

On Sun, Oct 26, 2014 at 7:07 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 26 October 2014 09:36, Russell Keith-Magee <russell at keith-magee.com>
> wrote:
> > On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 11:25 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> I think both iOS and Android are well and truly established enough now
> >> as platforms to be worth targeting directly. For the CI problem, it
> >> may be worth approaching Xamarin, as setting up the infrastructure for
> >> doing that ourselves looks like a formidable engineering challenge we
> >> don't currently have the relevant skillsets to provide.
> >
> > Is this said in the context of "we (Python) have an existing relationship
> > with Xamarin, and we should lean on those contacts", or "we should really
> > develop a relationship with Xamarin"?
>
> The latter - although as Antoine noted, we *do* have some nominally
> supported platforms that don't have buildbots. That configuration just
> means that *other* core devs aren't likely to be too worried about
> breaking the platform - more of the burden will fall back on the folks
> actually keeping that platform running.
>

Understood. That's essentially the status quo anyway, just with the code
outside the Python repository.

However, it did occur to me that running in the iOS and Android
> simulators should be feasible on a normal x86_64 system, assuming you
> can figure out a way to run the regression test suite without a normal
> console.
>

Both iOS and Android have a console that could be used to display test
output - it's just not visible on the phone itself. The "Hello world" you
get at the end of the template project I linked to earlier produces a
couple of lines on the debug console. In theory, I guess it should be
possible to build a full iOS/Android "App" whose only purpose is to run the
Python test suite. I haven't tried this; I'll put it on my todo list.

Regarding the test process: It's certainly possible to run the iOS
simulator and Android emulator on x86_64 machines -- but the iOS simulator
is a completely different CPU architecture to that used on a device. It
might be useful as a sanity check, but you'd still want to run the actual
iOS build on an actual iOS device to confirm it was fully working as
expected.

Yours,
Russ Magee %-)
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