dan-v
commented
4 years ago Hi @lambdadog, thanks for the feature request. The issue of patch and prebuilt modifications not counting as changes for a build is covered in #77. The other part of your request dealing with only rebuilding a portion of AOSP when patching, unfortunately doesn't work in this world as AOSP is fully synced from scratch and built every time. It is done this way to avoid the costs of having to store >300GB worth of data, which if stored in an EBS volume would be ~$30/month. This unfortunately makes it quite difficult to use for patch development (there is an issue for a better development environment #86). I have my own process outside of this that I use for AOSP development and I'm hoping some day to have this integrated, but it will likely require a decent amount of additional cost for anyone who opts into this.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. When editing my patches, prebuilts, etc. I'm required to force a build for the changes to take. Not only does this require everything to rebuild, which is unnecessary when only patching AOSP, it's a confusing flow that may cause a less user-facing patch that's added to be assumed to be installed but instead not be at all, if AOSP hasn't updated since your last build. I'm of the opinion that this is a pretty major oversight, depending on the nature of the patch in question.
Describe the solution you'd like Simply put, ROS should consider changes in patches, etc. as a factor when determining whether to rebuild a component.