Replicant

Replicant 6.0 makes use of many packaged build tools in Debian to avoid using prebuilt binaries shipped with the AOSP toolchain. These Android build tools packages are not yet available on any GNU FSDG-compliant distro, at least to my knowledge. Therefore, it is currently not possible to build the toolchain and Replicant images on such distros without significant changes to the build system.

The current release of Trisquel is too old to have these packages and it will likely take a long time until the needed packages become available in Trisquel. Parabola lacks these packages because these tools are not yet packaged for Arch-based distros.

This issue can be solved by asking Trisquel developers if it's possible to upload the packages to Trisquel's repos and make them available for the current or next release. For Parabola, the required steps need to be investigated, how the missing tools can be packaged.

As a temporary solution, we could provide an archive that contains all binaries that are either not available as part of packages on FSDG-compliant distros or that are not buildable on these distros. We could provide a script as part of the archive that puts the binaries in the right places in the source tree. Changes to the build system are necessary so that binaries from the archive are detected. This would make it possible to build Replicant images on FSDG-compliant distros with the limitation of using binaries from Debian and not having all the needed tools directly available as packages or buildable from source. It is still a far better solution than using the prebuilt AOSP tools.

The temporary solution should only be considered if it is in fact a lot more work to make the tools available in FSDG-compliant distros.