1248744 - Add b2gdroid-alike gearvr product

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Kip broke down an experimental project that the Mozilla VR team would like to try.  They want to build a "chromeless" Fennec -- like b2gdroid -- that is an Oculus SDK [1] consumer.  There are a few parts to this:
* removing the Fennec UI, like b2gdroid;
* defining manifest entries stating that the new product is a "VR application";
* linking against the Oculus SDK, which is C.

A quick skim of the documentation shows that the Oculus SDK is provided as a modern Gradle plugin.  It's not clear without investigation that the SDK can be used by non-Gradle consumers, like the existing Fennec build system.  If the Gradle plugin is doing non-trivial things -- like rewriting manifests or running custom tools -- we'll need to grow whatever Gradle integration is required.  Luckily that's a long running and valuable Fennec project which is progressing: see Bug 1119520 and dependants.

[1]  https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/mobilesdk/latest/concepts/book-intro/

Comment 1

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

CC to fabrice, since he arranged this once and may have "lessons learned" to feedback to those following in his footsteps; and to jlund, who did the build scheduling work.  Nothing more concrete yet, y'all.

kip: in theory, you should be able to copy-paste mobile/android/b2gdroid into mobile/android/vr, and then:
* tear most of it out;
* update the branding;
* update the Android manifest;

Then you'll want build help to put everything behind a flag, to update the packaging, and to clone the TaskCluster build job.  There are probably dependency issues waiting with the Gradle/build system integration.

Comment 2

[:kip (Kearwood Gilbert)]

Thanks, Nick!  I have tried the copy-paste as you suggested and managed to produce builds locally with the chrome stripped out.  In addition to the steps you have identified above in Comment 1, a new "GearVR" driver would be added to /gfx/vr following the same pattern as the others.

Comment 3

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Mass closing as we are no longer working on b2g/firefox os.

Comment 4

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Mass closing as we are no longer working on b2g/firefox os.