On 11-08-2010 03:20, Jonathan Gordon wrote:
The test builds Thomas has been building are built with a single librockbox.so which is for a single screen size. This file is about 800kb and is very hard to update (impossible even?) without rebuilding the whole apk. If we continue with this method then we either need to setup an apk for each lcd size (yuck) or we build a separate librockbox.so for each lcd size and have only the needed one loaded (but all will be in the apk). This of course means a couple of MB which isn't much but most people have very tight mobile data allowances.
The download size is listed on the market. If people are worried about their data allowance, they can install over wifi. I don't think we should be that worried about the size of the apk.
The other problem with this is when it comes time to do an update the whole thing needs to be downloaded again. Do we want android to be the only target which cant run the svn builds and users are forced to only use the builds we push to the market (or make available on the site).
I think it would be perfectly reasonable if the market contains only the latest release and we host snapshot apks on rockbox.org which people can install and update as they please.
The other option is not building the librockbox.so into the apk at all but instead download it on first run, or try to load rockbox.zip from the sdcard. This allows the user to use whichever build they want, it means it can be integrated into the build system more simply, and we only ever need to update the .apk when the java changes (or we use that to try to force users onto the new releases).
This seems like you want to completely bypass the market update mechanism. It doesn't sound right to me.
-- Jonas Häggqvist rasher(at)rasher(dot)dk
