Termux packages

This project contains scripts and patches to build packages for the Termux Android application.

Setting up a build environment using Docker

For most people the best way to obtain an environment for building packages is by using Docker. This should work everywhere Docker is supported (replace / with \ if using Windows) and ensures an up to date build environment that is tested by other package builders.

Run the following script to setup a container (from an image created by scripts/Dockerfile) suitable for building packages:

./scripts/run-docker.sh

This source folder is mounted as the /root/termux-packages data volume, so changes are kept in sync between the host and the container when trying things out before committing, and built deb files will be available on the host in the debs/ directory just as when building on the host.

The docker container used for building packages is a Ubuntu 16.10 installation with necessary packages pre-installed. The default user is a non-root user to avoid problems with package builds modifying the system by mistake, but sudo can be used to install additional Ubuntu packages to be used during development.

Build commands can be given to be executed in the docker container directly:

./scripts/run-docker.sh ./build-package.sh libandroid-support

will launch the docker container, execute the ./build-package.sh libandroid-support command inside it and afterwards return you to the host prompt, with the newly built deb in debs/ to try out.

Note that building packages can take up a lot of space (especially if build-all.sh is used to build all packages) and you may need to increase the base device size if running with a storage driver using a small base size of 10 GB.

Build environment without Docker

If you can't run Docker you can use a Ubuntu 16.10 installation (either by installing a virtual maching guest or on direct hardware) by using the below scripts:

• Run scripts/setup-ubuntu.sh to install required packages and setup the /data/ folder.

• Run scripts/setup-android-sdk.sh to install the Android SDK and NDK at $HOME/lib/android-{sdk,ndk}.

There is also a Vagrantfile available as a shortcut for setting up an Ubuntu installation with the above steps applied.

Building a package

The basic build operation is to run ./build-package.sh $PKG, which:

1. Sets up a patched stand-alone Android NDK toolchain if necessary.

2. Reads packages/$PKG/build.sh to find out where to find the source code of the package and how to build it.

3. Extracts the source in $HOME/.termux-build/$PKG/src.

4. Applies all patches in packages/$PKG/*.patch.

5. Builds the package under $HOME/.termux-build/$PKG/ (either in the build/ directory there or in the src/ directory if the package is specified to build in the src dir) and installs it to $PREFIX.

6. Extracts modified files in $PREFIX into $HOME/.termux-build/$PKG/massage and massages the files there for distribution (removes some files, splits it up in sub-packages, modifies elf files).

7. Creates a deb package file for distribution in debs/.

Reading build-package.sh is the best way to understand what is going on.

Additional utilities

• build-all.sh: used for building all packages in the correct order (using buildorder.py).

• clean.sh: used for doing a clean rebuild of all packages.

• scripts/check-pie.sh: Used for verifying that all binaries are using PIE, which is required for Android 5+.

• scripts/check-versions.sh: used for checking for package updates.

• scripts/list-packages.sh: used for listing all packages with a one-line summary.

Resources

• Android changes for NDK developers

• Linux From Scratch

• Beyond Linux From Scratch

• OpenWrt as an embedded Linx distribution contains patches and build scripts

• Kivy recipes contains recipes for building packages for Android.

Common porting problems

• The Android bionic libc does not have iconv and gettext/libintl functionality built in. A libandroid-support package contains these and may be used by all packages.

• "error: z: no archive symbol table (run ranlib)" usually means that the build machines libz is used instead of the one for cross compilation, due to the builder library -L path being setup incorrectly

• rindex(3) does not exist, but strrchr(3) is preferred anyway.

• <sys/termios.h> does not exist, but <termios.h> is the standard location.

• <sys/fcntl.h> does not exist, but <fcntl.h> is the standard location.

• <sys/timeb.h> does not exist (removed in POSIX 2008), but ftime(3) can be replaced with gettimeofday(2).

• <glob.h> does not exist, but is available through the libandroid-glob package.

• SYSV shared memory is not supported by the kernel. A libandroid-shmem package, which emulates SYSV shared memory on top of the ashmem shared memory system, is available. Use it with LDFLAGS+=" -landroid-shmem.

• SYSV semaphores is not supported by the kernel. Use unnamed POSIX semaphores instead (named semaphores are unimplemented).

dlopen() and RTLD_* flags

<dlfcn.h> originally declares

enum { RTLD_NOW=0, RTLD_LAZY=1, RTLD_LOCAL=0, RTLD_GLOBAL=2,       RTLD_NOLOAD=4}; // 32-bit
enum { RTLD_NOW=2, RTLD_LAZY=1, RTLD_LOCAL=0, RTLD_GLOBAL=0x00100, RTLD_NOLOAD=4}; // 64-bit

These differs from glibc ones in that

1. They are not preprocessor #define:s so cannot be checked for with #ifdef RTLD_GLOBAL. Termux patches this to #define values for compatibility with several packages.
2. They differ in value from glibc ones, so cannot be hardcoded in files (DLFCN.py in python does this)
3. They are missing some values (RTLD_BINDING_MASK, RTLD_NOLOAD, ...)

RPATH, RUNPATH AND LD_LIBRARY_PATH

On desktop linux the linker searches for shared libraries in:

1. RPATH - a list of directories which is linked into the executable, supported on most UNIX systems. It is ignored if RUNPATH is present.
2. LD_LIBRARY_PATH - an environment variable which holds a list of directories
3. RUNPATH - same as RPATH, but searched after LD_LIBRARY_PATH, supported only on most recent UNIX systems

The Android linker, /system/bin/linker, does not support RPATH or RUNPATH, so we set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$PREFIX/lib and try to avoid building useless rpath entries (which the linker warns about) with --disable-rpath configure flags. NOTE: Starting from Android 7.0 RUNPATH (but not RPATH) is supported.

Warnings about unused DT entries

Starting from 5.1 the Android linker warns about VERNEED (0x6FFFFFFE) and VERNEEDNUM (0x6FFFFFFF) ELF dynamic sections (WARNING: linker: $BINARY: unused DT entry: type 0x6ffffffe/0x6fffffff). These may come from version scripts (-Wl,--version-script=). The termux-elf-cleaner utilty is run from build-package.sh and should normally take care of that problem. NOTE: Starting from Android 6.0 symbol versioning is supported.