build: exclude aapt1 binary, minimize revanced-library

[kitadai31]

First, exclude aapt1 binaries.
aapt1 is never used in ReVanced CLI, but accounts for 10% of the jar size.

Second, specify app.revanced:revanced-patcher explicitly in the minimize block, because revanced-library does not need to be excluded from minimization.
Since ReVanced Library was born, exclude(dependency("app.revanced:.*")) has been excluding revanced-library from minimization unintentionally.
(This line exists before ReVanced Library was created.)

I tested patching, list patches, list versions, mount/unmount, and install/uninstall. It worked as expected.

Finally, remove exclude(dependency("org.jetbrains.kotlin:.*")) as it has no effect. Removing or adding this line made no difference.

This PR reduces the jar size as follows:
Removing aapt1: 49.9 MB -> 44.8 MB
Optimize minimization: 44.8 MB -> 40.3 MB

[oSumAtrIX]

Shouldn't this be done in ReVanced Patcher?

[kitadai31]

I don't think so.

In my understanding, the ReVanced Patcher jar doesn't includes these aapt binaries that comes from apktool-lib dependency, so patcher has no control over whether aapt resources gets included in the final fat jar of CLI.

In addition, ReVanced Manager also excludes aapt in its build.gradle.
https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager/blob/d201bdc422fcceb09040398c87edbaf2e97c7296/app/build.gradle.kts#L63

[oSumAtrIX]

But now every frontend would have to remove this library. This is duplication that should've been handled by the library itself, because the library itself does not use aapt1. Please check if it is possible to move this to ReVanced Patcher, I would rather not want to do this here.

[kitadai31]

I have researched for a while and it seems impossible to move this change to ReVanced Patcher.

Another option is to remove aapt1 from ReVanced/Apktool fork.
If this fork is only used by the ReVanced Patcher, this is an option.

[oSumAtrIX]

Why is it impossible?

[kitadai31]

Gradle specification.

I first analyzed the revenged-patcher artifacts.
The artifact of ReVanced Patcher have these three files:

• revanced-patcher-20.0.0.jar
• revanced-patcher-20.0.0.pom
• revanced-patcher-20.0.0.module

Among these, the jar contains only the classes of revanced-patches.
Dependency information is contained in the pom and module.

In the pom file, dependencies are written like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 https://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  ...
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.jetbrains.kotlin</groupId>
      <artifactId>kotlin-stdlib</artifactId>
      <version>2.0.0</version>
      <scope>compile</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>app.revanced</groupId>
      <artifactId>apktool-lib</artifactId>
      <version>2.9.3</version>
      <scope>runtime</scope>
    </dependency>
    ...
  </dependencies>
</project>

If a <dependency> element can be configured to exclude certain files from the jar file, then aapt1 can be excluded on the revanced-patcher side.
However, according to the POM descriptors reference, there is no such feature.
https://maven.apache.org/ref/3.9.9/maven-model/maven.html#class_dependency

The module file is for Gradle but same as pom.

Therefore, I concluded that this is impossible.

Also, this ChatGPT's answer is helpful to understand.
https://chatgpt.com/share/5a610a60-6992-4568-bde3-b32dc0b8f727

[oSumAtrIX]

Can't a wildcard be used to reduce the amount of exclude statements?

[kitadai31]

I tried my best but it's not possible.
If I use a wildcard, it will always match aapt2.
Example: exclude("/prebuilt/**/aapt*") matches /prebuilt/linux/aapt2, /prebuilt/linux/aapt2_64

Apache Ant style wildcard is supported here, but it has only three wildcards, ?, *, and **
If I put aapt*, it also matches aapt2* always.
So there is no way to avoid including aapt2 binaries other than to list the five aapt1.

[Ushie]

What about something like this?

exclude("/prebuilt/*/aapt") exclude("/prebuilt/*/aapt_*") exclude("/prebuilt/*/aapt.*") though at that point, listing all might aswell be better

[kitadai31]

Sorry I was dumb
Your wildcards work, thank you

I made a few adjustments.
Remove wildcards from Linux aapt and Windows aapt.exe, and put 3 arguments into single exclude() call.
I think this is compact and visually easy to see what is being excluded.

Suggested change

	exclude("/prebuilt/linux/aapt")
	exclude("/prebuilt/linux/aapt_64")
	exclude("/prebuilt/macosx/aapt_64")
	exclude("/prebuilt/windows/aapt.exe")
	exclude("/prebuilt/windows/aapt_64.exe")
	exclude("/prebuilt/linux/aapt", "/prebuilt/windows/aapt.exe", "/prebuilt/*/aapt_*")