Improve first time user experience of fdroid build
We ask people in Data MRs to build-test their apps with fdroid build
.
The process of getting that to work for a modern android app is not all that smooth, so here are a few ideas how that can be improved:
- When no
config.py
is present create one with default values containing documentation of all options instead of erroring out. Or add a new option like--first-run
and suggest that to the user to not create config.py's in random folders. - Improve the gradle experience for local testing. The buildserver has all gradle releases available but you don't have that locally. Instead you\d rely on the gradle wrapper to download the correct version for you. What I do as a crude workaround is running
./gradlew assembleRelease
in an apps repository to download the correct gradle version, then prepend it to my path with something like thisexport PATH=~/.gradle/wrapper/dists/gradle-2.14.1-all/4cj8p00t3e5ni9e8iofg8ghvk7/gradle-2.14.1/bin/:$PATH
. For testing purposes it would be really helpful if fdroid could fetch the correct gradle version for you instead of having to do acrobatics with your PATH. - ndk handling, see #369.
- sdk handling. Not sure if we want to do anything here, this is normally the easiest part, maybe point to some documentation if that can't be found.