Are there beginner-friendly AOSP/GrapheneOS development guidelines?

traveller

In terms of development of the AOSP/Graphene itself, not the apps.
What tools are normally being used (is it something like VSCodium?), what is the development/testing workflow (I suppose the majority of development is happening using an emulator, rather than a real device?)

raccoondad

traveller no not really it requires more experience than a 'beginner', including comfortability with android development in general, including apps

akc3n

traveller perhaps this may give you a better overview of what's involved https://grapheneos.org/build (check the sections towards the end) and where to go next.

traveller VSCodium

Unlikely (electron...?).
Maybe Vim/neovim, IntelliJ, Android Studio...

traveller

raccoondad I understand that - by "beginner" I mean beginner in AOSP world, not in software development, and wondering whether there are specific well-established practices and tools, overview of the codebase structure, etc.

traveller

Actually ignore the question. There's quite a lot of info on the topic on the internet, from Google itself and otherwise.

traveller

akc3n perhaps this may give you a better overview of what's involved https://grapheneos.org/build (check the sections towards the end) and where to go next

that's the first thing I've looked at :)

akc3n Unlikely (electron...?).
Maybe Vim/neovim, IntelliJ, Android Studio...

I've found vscode to be universal (for example, in terms of quick search across a huge code database of different subprojects - apps, system frameworks, all in different programming languages), but I suppose devs are mostly using what they prefer personally, like Android Studio for the UI apps, etc?

What is inconvenient - a very large build time (It takes me 20-30 minutes to get a very simple change over to the device).

After doing a change to the code, I am doing the following:

# compile into an installation image
source build/envsetup.sh
lunch panther-cur-user
m vendorbootimage vendorkernelbootimage target-files-package
m otatoools-package
script/finalize.sh
script/generate-release.sh panther $BUILD_NUMBER

#then install
# reboot the phone holding the volume button (bootloader is already unlocked)
cd release/release-panther-$BUILD_NUMBER
bsdtar xvc panther-install-$BUILD_NUMBER.zip
cd panther-install-$BUILD_NUMBER
bash flash_all.sh

then I can actually see the changes I made in the system (after going through standard "Android initial setup wizard").

A few questions though:

I suppose it is better to use the idea of incremental updates rather than generating a full image every time, as it may speed up at least the phone flashing part?
Am I doing other unnecessary steps, or is this a typical workflow during development?
I had to install Arch Linux on Mac, which makes using it quite painful :). I understand that building AOSP on macOS is not officially supported, but given that macOS is a unix-based system with most (if not all) tools available via homebrew, are there some critical tools still missing on it that makes is impractical to do the development/building on macOS?

n3t_admin

traveller but given that macOS is a unix-based system with most (if not all) tools available via homebrew, are there some critical tools still missing on it that makes is impractical to do the development/building on macOS?

I am not sure which tools are incompatible or missing, but there might be slight differences that can make or a break a successful build. Trying to troubleshoot these failed builds will likely be a waste of time due to undocumented changes for macOS equivalents.
Also: this is more of an upstream thing. Google also restricts AOSP builds to Linux with some very clear requirements.

Considering that pretty much every modern Mac is now running Apple Silicon (while Intel is on their way out), you'd also have to account for aarch64 (for better or worse) and the fact Apple Silicon uses 16k bit page size, which might break some directly ported tools on macOS (where page size is assumed and hardcoded).

I think building on macOS will not be as easy to achieve as one would hope for.