git-annex/doc/design/assistant/blog/day_186__Android_success.mdwn
2013-02-11 17:33:54 -04:00

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I'm now successfully using git-annex at the command line on Android.
`git annex watch` works too.
For now, I'm using a git repository under `/data`, which is on a real,
non-cripped filesystem, so symlinks work there.
There's still the issue of running without any symlinks on `/mnt/sdcard`.
While direct mode gets most of the way, it still uses symlinks in a few
places, so some more work will be needed there. Also, git-annex uses hard
links to lock down files, which won't work on cripped filesystems.
Besides that, there's lots of minor porting, but no big show-stoppers
currently.. Some of today's porting work:
* Cross-compiled git for Android. While the Terminal IDE app has some git
stuff, it's not complete and misses a lot of plumbing commands git-annex
uses. My git build needs some tweaks to be relocatable without setting
`GIT_EXEC_PATH`, but it works.
* Switched git-annex to use the Haskell glob library, rather than PCRE. This
avoids needing libpcre, which simplifies installation on several platforms
(including Android).
* Made git-annex's `configure` hardcode some settings when cross-compiling
for Android, rather than probing the build system.
* Android's built-in `lsof` doesn't support the -F option to use a
machine-readable output format. So wrote a separate lsof output parser for
the standard lsof output format. Unfortunatly, Android's lsof does not
provide any information about where a file is open for read or write, so
for safety, git-annex has to assume any file that's open might be written
to, and avoid annexing it. It might be better to provide my own lsof
eventually.