Re: Merging feature/android

[Paul Eggert]

On 2023-03-05 02:40, Po Lu wrote:

> But nothing prevents us from making this tiny change to our configury to
> make Emacs work with those old compilers.

It may not be as simple as we'd like. If it involves testing the Android 
runtime then we could well be out of luck. If it's merely testing 
whether the compiler crashes then we may be OK (it partly depends on how 
"reliably" the compiler crashes :-).


> It is best to follow the Autoconf Way.  Otherwise, we will be heading
> back to the age where configure looked for the a m/ header and then ran
> Makefile.c through sed and cpp.

In Gnulib we prefer to follow the Autoconf Way. However, sometimes it's 
easier not to, such as when there are hard-to-test runtime errors or 
flaky compiler errors; in these cases we don't.


> I cannot agree with this statement when I see every day my relatives and
> coworkers using such old versions of Android, which are also supported
> by many proprietary software developers.

In the end it's up to you as to how you will spend your own time. 
However, I can't recommend that we significantly complicate Emacs for 
every developer, merely to cater to people running old, unsupported 
versions of Android with well-known security bugs that bad actors are 
targeting. Overall I expect that would be a net minus for the GNU project.


> An old version of the NDK works fine, and is in fact still supported by
> Google (r16 is provided in the SDK manager's downloads page as an LTS
> release), aside from having this nasty compiler problem.

Simply publishing downloads of old releases is not the same as 
supporting the releases. By "supported" I mean Google will fix serious 
bugs, such as security bugs, in the old releases. We don't want people 
building Emacs with serious security bugs.

As I understand it, r16 is no longer supported by Google. I'm basing my 
understanding on the listing of the r16b download on the Android NDK 
"Unsupported Downloads" wiki 
<https://github.com/android/ndk/wiki/Unsupported-Downloads>. If I'm 
wrong, please feel free to correct me; I'm certainly no expert on the NDK.