android-sysroot

A prebuilt, pinned GLib / GObject-Introspection prefix for Android, one tarball per ABI (arm64-v8a, x86_64). It is the build input of @gjsify/gi-runtime-android: gjsify's release job downloads it, checks it against the sha256 sums pinned in gjsify, and cross-builds @gjsify/node-gi and the AAR from it with nothing but the Android NDK.

The same split as NativeScript's V8 (NativeScript/v8-buildscripts releases, pinned by V8_RELEASE in NativeScript/android), and the role gvsbuild's release assets play for gjsify's Windows bundle: the expensive part is built rarely, here; the cheap part on every release, there.

Why it is not built in CI

g-ir-scanner has to run a dumper binary compiled for the target. This build runs it on an Android emulator over adb (tools/adb-run), which a GitHub runner does not offer cheaply. So the prefix is rebuilt by hand, and only when the stack changes — glib, gobject-introspection, the NDK, or a patch.

What a release holds

android-sysroot-<tag>-<abi>.tar.gz and SHA256SUMS. The tarballs are byte-reproducible from the same build tree (fixed order, owner and mtime; gzip without name or timestamp), and each ABI's lands in its own directories, so all of them unpack into one prefix:

include/<abi>/                 headers (three of them differ between ABIs)
lib/<abi>/*.so                 the stack, --strip-debug
lib/<abi>/pkgconfig/*.pc       relocatable: prefix=${pcfiledir}/../../..
lib/<abi>/girepository-1.0/    typelibs
lib/<abi>/glib-2.0/include/    glibconfig.h, and the other per-arch config headers
share/licenses/<project>/      licence texts from every subproject's source tree
share/android-sysroot/<abi>.json
                               NDK revision, libraries, typelibs, and the exact git
                               commit or version of every subproject

Building it

Host: Linux with meson, glib and gobject-introspection installed (the host's g-ir-compiler and GIRs are used), the Android SDK and NDK 27.1.12297006, pixiewood from gtk-android-builder, and a running x86_64 emulator with arm64 translation (or a device) on adb — set ANDROID_SERIAL when more than one is attached.

pip install --target tools/pyvendor patchelf

work=~/build/gi-probe                       # any directory outside this checkout
cp -r recipe "$work"
sed "s|@TOOLS@|$PWD/tools|" recipe/pixiewood.xml.in > "$work/pixiewood.xml"
(cd "$work" && pixiewood prepare --sdk ~/Android/Sdk pixiewood.xml && pixiewood -v build --skip-gradle)

node scripts/pack-sysroot.mjs --source "$work" --tag <tag> --out dist \
    --ndk ~/Android/Sdk/ndk/27.1.12297006
gh release create <tag> dist/*.tar.gz dist/SHA256SUMS

recipe/ is a minimal pixiewood app (gi-probe) whose only purpose is to make pixiewood build the GTK/Libadwaita stack with introspection on; pack-sysroot.mjs leaves its own library out. tools/ holds the cross-build glue — adb-run (meson's exe_wrapper and g-ir-scanner's GI_CROSS_LAUNCHER), the g-ir-scanner and pkg-config wrappers — and is explained in gjsify's report on GI in a pixiewood APK.

The wraps track upstream branches, so two builds a week apart differ. What a given tarball was built from is in its share/android-sysroot/<abi>.json.

Tests

node --test scripts/

License

The recipe and scripts are MIT (LICENSE). The binaries in the release assets keep their own projects' terms; each tarball carries the texts under share/licenses/.