As discussed in our previous post on Android Customization, some of the software we're modifying for SABRE Lite and Nitrogen6X are restricted by licenses.
They're still open-source, but not completely free to distribute, and require acceptance of an End User License agreement, so we can't simply post the sources in a public repository on GitHub, et cetera.
In order to address these needs, we've put together a private git
server using gitolite. This system is configured to performs user authorization through SSH Public key authentication.
If you look in the the Android R13.4 repo manifest, you'll see that the server (remote
) named boundary-linode
has a base URL of ssh://git@linode.boundarydevices.com/
.
In English, this means that the reference is to a user named git
on a server named linode.boundarydevices.com
and uses the ssh
protocol. This user is configured with no valid password and can only be accessed by clients that provide specific public keys. For details on how this works, please Google "ssh public key authentication".
As a practical matter, this will require that you have an ssh
client installed. This should be automatic on any Linux or Mac installation. Under Windows, you'll likely need Cygwin to get the combination of ssh
and git
.
Once you have SSH and git installed, you'll also need to generate a private/public key pair. There's a nice tutorial on Github that explains how to do this.
Finally, in order to confirm agreement with our EULA, we'll need you to:
Once this is done, you'll receive a confirmation e-mail when we've configured the private server(s) with your credentials.
This is a hassle, but having this infrastructure in place will allow us to share code for a number of restricted packages, and we help it enables you to get your products to market faster.