I've been thinking about version numbers lately. Specifically, why we default to semantic versioning for everything when a lot of software would be better served by a build number, a commit hash, and release notes that someone actually bothered to write.
I worked through this with a friend, then pressure-tested the conclusions. The picture is more nuanced than I initially thought — but the core thesis survived, with some honest caveats.
Let me walk through it.
A working pattern for self-hosted Android CI on arm64 hardware. This setup builds release APKs for Pixel-class devices without an emulator, runs entirely in rootless Podman under a Quadlet-managed systemd user unit, and works around the fact that Google still ships an x86_64-only aapt2 binary in the Android SDK build-tools.
Tested on a Raspberry Pi 5 (16 GB, NVMe) running Debian 13 trixie, with Gitea 1.24+ and gitea-runner 1.0.x. The pattern should generalize to any arm64 Linux host running rootless Podman.
Self-hosting Android CI on arm64 hardware sounds simple — install the SDK, run Gradle, profit. In practice there are several non-obvious obstacles:
| import datetime | |
| import json | |
| import os | |
| import subprocess | |
| import sys | |
| ############# | |
| ### USAGE ### | |
| ############# |