Re: Merging feature/android

[Po Lu]

Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> 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 only depends on checking for the crash, which happens reliably with
the test I wrote.  ``cleanup'' is also a compiler only feature, as long
as you do not build C++ code or use -fexceptions, so the C++ runtime is
not involved at all.

>> 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.

[...]

> 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.

I'm not aware of a serious security bug in Google GCC or Clang which
affects compiled code.

Either way, if we go by what the Google does (or does not) support, then
in one or two years we will no longer be able to support the latest
version of Replicant.  Judging by that, the speed at which support is
removed for older Android versions is dropped is quite unreasonable.