Hello,
Yong Qin is working on the blueprint https://blueprints.launchpad.net/lava-android-test/+spec/modify-android-buil... to add arbitrary custom client-side scripts to Android Build. He submitted first implementation of it as https://code.launchpad.net/~liuyq0307/linaro-android-build-tools/run-custom/... and documented as https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/AndroidBuild-LavaIntegration .
Unfortunately, I'm not thrilled with that implementation, more specifically, its "user interface" (i.e. any parts which user directly faces) by the following reasons:
1. The idea behind Android Build's build config was that they're short and easy for human to parse, essentially one glance-over would enough to get a good idea what is built here, even for outsider. Consequently, the configs should not be overloaded with details not related to building. If there's a need for integration with other systems, we have good pattern of externalizing such details and then just referring to them with a single variable in a build config.
2. The whole approach in https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/AndroidBuild-LavaIntegration seems like trying to encode hierarchical structure in the shell syntax, which is not much supporting of that. The end result looks pretty much like representation of graph structure in raw assembler - it's spaghetti mix of data pieces and labels, requiring long time to wrap hand around to understand it, and cumbersome and error-prone to write.
So, I would like to propose alternative syntax solving the issues above. I probably should start with saying that if the talk is about LAVA, then using native LAVA JSON request immediately comes to mind. Well, I guess human-writability wasn't a design goal for that, so I skip it. It still makes sense to stick to general-purpose hierarchical structure syntax though. Except that JSON has 2 problems: a) it doesn't support comments natively, so we'll need to pre-process it; b) error reporting/localization may be still no ideal.
Anyway, here's my try, it is presented as a comment to https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/AndroidBuild-LavaIntegration and then full example at https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/AndroidBuild-LavaIntegration/pfalco...
Let's discuss if that covers our needs and constraints.
Thanks, Paul
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