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  2. gn/
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  4. download.md
  5. integrating.md
  6. layout.md
  7. README.md
  8. standards.md
  9. understanding_metadata.md
docs/development/idk/README.md

Integrator Development Kit (IDK)

This folder contains information about developing the Fuchsia Integrator Development Kit (IDK). For information on the GN C++ Frontend SDK see this getting started guide.

Download the Fuchsia IDK

Strategy

Fuchsia is taking a modular approach to exposing the Fuchsia platform to developers.

At the center of this strategy is the Integrator Development Kit (IDK), distilled out of the present Git repository. This IDK contains a small set of libraries and tools required to start building and running programs that target Fuchsia. The contents of that IDK represent the most basic contract that the Fuchsia platform developers offer to prospective developers.

The Fuchsia IDK is not suitable for immediate consumption. It does not contain any reference to toolchains or build systems, and in fact does not require any specific instance of these. While this might be viewed as a drawback, this is actually a feature, an integral part of a layered approach to building a fully-functional SDK. Even though it is not tied to a particular build system, the IDK contains metadata that may be used to produce support for a large variety of build systems, thereby producing various SDK distributions. Having the IDK cleanly separated from these various distributions allows for very flexible release schemes and iteration cycles.

The present documentation focuses on the details of the creation process of the IDK. The documentation included in the IDK, hosted under //idk/docs, contains information regarding how to work with the IDK. Lastly, some examples of SDK distributions can be found under //scripts/sdk; most notably it contains a frontend generating a workspace enabling Fuchsia development using Bazel - this distribution is currently used to test versions of the IDK before they are published.

What belongs in the IDK?

By default, a piece of code in the Fuchsia tree cannot be added to any IDK: participation is a strictly opt-in decision. Additionally, this decision is encoded locally within the code's build file. This was done for multiple reasons:

  1. Developers modifying the code need to be aware of the potential impact on external customers as early as possible;
  2. Publishing that code to the IDK may require extra input from the developers to inform the build system about how to properly include that code in an SDK;
  3. Knowing whether the code may be included in an IDK or not allows the build system to perform extra checks on that code to ensure conformity with IDK standards.

In order to be made available in the IDK, a piece of code must follow a set of standards and guidelines.

Infrastructure

The SDK creation pipeline consists of two pieces:

  1. The backend, which uses the build system to generate a tarball containing compiled artifacts, source files, and metadata;
  2. The frontend, which applies transformations to that tarball and turn into e.g. an SDK distribution.

Backend

The backend really is just a specialized use of the build system. In other words, running the SDK backend amounts to passing the right set of arguments to the Fuchsia build system, which in turn produces an archive with a set layout. The inner workings of the backend are described here.

The backend does not just produce an IDK: it is also used as a control mechanism for API evolution. The API surface exposed by the IDK is captured in a set of reference files representing its elements: modifications to this surface need to be explicitly acknowledged by developers by updating the relevant reference files, whose latest version is also generated by the backend. The purpose of this mechanism is to detect and prevent accidental changes to the IDK as early as possible in the release cycle, as well as give us tools to observe and review the evolution of the API surface.

Frontend

The term frontend is used to describe any process that ingests the Fuchsia IDK archive and applies transformations to it.

In the Fuchsia tree, frontends are used to generate SDK distributions, e.g. a Bazel-ready workspace.

Frontends may also be used to adapt a Fuchsia IDK archive for consumption in a particular development environment by for example generating build files for a given build system. The presence of extensive metadata in the archive itself allows for this kind of processing.

IDK and IDK add-ons

The Core IDK is represented by the //sdk:core target. That IDK is complemented by multiple IDK add-ons:

  • //sdk:e2e_testing: an end-to-end testing framework for Fuchsia;
  • //sdk:modular_testing: an hermetic testing framework for the app framework;
  • //sdk:fuchsia_dart: a Dart SDK to build mods and agents.

Internally these targets are all instances of the sdk GN template.

Recipes

Generating an IDK archive

The various targets representing SDKs are always included in the build graph. In order to build the contents of an SDK, build one of the targets above.

Note that this will generate and verify IDK contents, but won't actually build an archive with these contents. To build the archive, add the GN argument build_sdk_archives=true to your build configuration and run the build command again. The resulting archive will be located under <outdir>/sdk/archive/<name>.tar.gz.

Adding content to an IDK

The first step is to make that content available to SDKs. This is done by using a set of templates listed in the backend documentation. The next step is to add that content to an existing IDK definition. For a target //path/to/my:super_target, this is accomplished by making the implicit //path/to/my:super_target_sdk target a dependency of the sdk target.

Note that some content types require a .api source file describing the state of the IDK element's API. These files are produced by the build system. In order to seed the first version of such a file, let the build system tell you where it expects to find the file, then create this file and leave it empty, and finally run the build again: it will again tell you where to get the initial version from.

Turning IDK-related errors into warnings

There exist some build steps to verify that the contents of an IDK don't get modified by accident. An unacknowledged modification results in a build failure until the relevant reference files are updated in the source tree. While locally iterating on some public API, having to repeatedly update reference files can be tedious. In order to turn the build errors into warnings, configure then build with this extra GN argument: warn_no_sdk_changes=true.

Producing an SDK distribution

This is done by running a frontend. See the frontend documentation for more details.