Optimization idea: exclude qq strings from build.

[dbrant]

Here's the idea: We have a large number of localized strings resources that correspond to different languages. One of those "languages" is qq, but it's not really a language - it's just hints for the translators and will never be used in the app itself, and yet the qq strings still get packaged into the APK, because the compiler believes that qq is just another language.

So, is there a way for us to exclude qq from the build? This turned out to be much more difficult than I thought. The solution that I finally arrived at works like this:

The Gradle plugin offers a parameter called resConfigs that lets us specify which languages to include (but not exclude). So we need a way to enumerate all the languages that we have, except qq, and pass them into resConfigs. I am therefore using Groovy to literally list the directory contents of the res folder, and filter out the localization directories, and feed them into the resConfigs setting.