Building Android

... is it just me or is this a really crazy development setup? I've been mirroring AOSP over my cellphone data plan for a solid week now, it's already pulled in 90GB of code and is not showing a sign of stopping. It's a real bother because my provider automatically turns off the tap after a certain amount of data and I have to fill in a captha to turn it back on. I just want to have all the stuff to maintain/re-install my devices on my laptop without the stupid of keeping around a bunch of sketchy 3rd-party dev pre-built images. Anyone want to share some references to help with basic sense-making in the face of this stuff? Why exactly do I feel like it'd be "impossible" to have a fully transparently compiled Android ROM, are there a bunch of blobs in the AOSP project? Do I still have to findn some kind of repo with all kinds of device-specific blobs because AOSP is insufficient to build ROMs for most devices? If so I may need to buy extra storage just to fit all the different ROMs onto my device, I'd like to have a complete archive of ROMs because I hear those linkrot all the time and I want to have the general capability of re-installing Android devices regardless of specific model.

>>32048 >Do I still have to findn some kind of repo with all kinds of device-specific blobs because AOSP is insufficient to build ROMs for most devices? Yes.

>>32049 Right. Shit. I'll pull in the decompiler ecosystem as well then.

>... is it just me or is this a really crazy development setup? It’s soykaf, yes. > I've been mirroring AOSP over my cellphone data plan for a solid week now, it's already pulled in 90GB of code and is not showing a sign of stopping. I think it’s a bit over 100gb and takes another 100gb to build. You can clone only master and shallow clone. >Anyone want to share some references to help with basic sense-making in the face of this stuff? PostmarketOS and lineageOS ircs. >Why exactly do I feel like it'd be "impossible" to have a fully transparently compiled Android ROM, are there a bunch of blobs in the AOSP project? The cheaper the phone the most blobs it will have. Pixels for example upstream most if not all drivers. >Do I still have to findn some kind of repo with all kinds of device-specific blobs because AOSP is insufficient to build ROMs for most devices? LineageOS or estract the blobs from the factory ROM yourself.

>>32058 >mirror size I'm still running the deep mirror and am at 163GB and counting, LOL. I guess I just hope it stays below a 450GB total... maybe the mirroring process is going to clean up some of its cache at the end but I don't count on it. >IRCs Can't work with those I need hard storage. I'm doing archives so I can retract from interacting with out-of-country inet sources, I'm tired of having my digital footprint spread out internationally. I'll look into mirroring their wikis and ask for IRC logs, though. >blob extraction Yes I think that that'll end up being the "compression method", but extracting the blobs seems quite non-trivial if I want to ensure I end up with an extract that can feasibly be used to construct a fully-functional OS.

>>32058 fuuuuuuuuuuaaarrrrkkkk lineageOS says it takes another 500GB to mirror. Stoopid parasitic ecosystem, glad I'm leaving.

>>32063 > I'm doing archives so I can retract from interacting with out-of-country inet sources, I'm tired of having my digital footprint spread out internationally. I'll look into mirroring their wikis and ask for IRC logs, though. Libera is privacy respecting and IRC is a very simple protocol, you could connect only through tor. I totally understand your privacy concerns btw. > but extracting the blobs seems quite non-trivial if I want to ensure I end up with an extract that can feasibly be used to construct a fully-functional OS. It’s not that hard. LineageOS has scripts to automate the process IIRC. I haven’t done this in an while. Have you heard of PinePhone? It’s not as expensive as librem and runs GNU/Linux.

>>32070 >privacy concerns It's partly about privacy, but it's more primary to me that I don't profit from various kinds of labor and economic explotation. E.g., buying secondhand and not discarding devices/ensuring they are re-used them, is more important to me than getting FOSS devices that I have to cause profit to a company on American soil for, and feed the international tech trade and international monetary system by. Of course if I could get FOSS devices second-hand that would be the ideal. But if I can't, I will just keep buying up and refurbishing whateverphones for cheap, and then preferably give them away or resell at-cost to friends, who otherwise would buy new devices. Keeping them off the market for new devices is ample reward for my labor for now. >LineageOS I found a collection of blobs that I won't post here because I haven't seen that many mirrors of it. I'd share it if I were more certain of it remaining publically accessible, I couldn't replace it with my own means at this time so I won't risk it. >PinePhone & Librem I'll keep an eye out for them for second-hands, my sounds like well-worth getting. At this time I already have my devices sectioned by application (e.g. govt. crap v. offline stuff) but they're not "deloused", only re-imaged from random forum images and rooted.

>>32073 >I found a collection of blobs that I won't post here because I haven't seen that many mirrors of it. I'd share it if I were more certain of it remaining publically accessible, I couldn't replace it with my own means at this time so I won't risk it. You can just get it from the lineageOS github. It's not a secret.

>>32074 Thanks because that revealed some more useful stuff to mirror, but incorrect, the LineageOS device trees do not include the proprietary firmware which is necessary and even the only thing that's really primary for me to archive. According to LineageOS instructions you have to extract those from their pre-made images, and they don't archive those images below version <X> where X is currently 17 or 19 or something like that.

>>32063 >I'm doing archives so I can retract from interacting with out-of-country inet sources, I'm tired of having my digital footprint spread out internationally. I'll look into mirroring their wikis and ask for IRC logs, though.

>>32048 >pic related represents cell phone technology as a whole

>>32075 You can find the blobs online. Just make sure it’s a trustworthy member of the community, preferably someone active in the lineageOS irc or GitHub.