As some of you may have noticed, native Android development is not as easy as it could be. Talented developers have ported many libraries, but those ports have been done in a monolithic way : in order to use them, you have to fork the developer's repository which itself consists of the forks of many projects.

This is complex, brittle, and it encourages a duplication of the efforts.

Even worse : when upstream adds support for Android, they tend to do this in similar brittle way that requires hardcoding relative paths and other ugliness.

This is sad, especially because the NDK contains the required bricks that allows for packaging (most) libraries in a clean and reliable way. 

So before we end up with the autoconf nightmare all over again, I would like to propose a unified way of packaging libraries so that FOSS softwares are easier to build for the Android platform.

Basically, these simple conventions use the existing mecanisms in the Android NDK to provide fonctionalities similar to those of pkg-config on regular Linux systems.