This is an effort to extract Android's low-level system imaging tools from its massive build system,
as well as make sure they compile properly against the musl libc. The major feature here is
accomplishing that goal while patching or modifying the upstream sources from AOSP as little as
possible. This makes updating much easier -- simply examining the changes to relevant Android.bp
and Android.mk files, without worrying about source changes.
Update: Google added protobuf as a dependency. I don't have the time to invest in this anymore, so I will no longer be making source code updates.
As Google uses clang++ to build the Android userspace, this project requires a relatively recent version of clang++ and libc++ to compile. It will not work with g++; if you try it, you're on your own.
Simply run make to compile the utilities along with several necessary libraries. The binaries are
statically linked to all android libraries, but they depend on libcrypto and libz from the host.
The build system uses pkg-config to find the right CFLAGS and LDFLAGS for those libraries. Run
make install to install the final binaries to /usr/bin, or specify PREFIX or DESTDIR to
override the install destination.
As of March 2019, the utilities should build with glibc. However, I don't use glibc, so I cannot guarantee that it will continue to work. I'll apply changes that fix glibc without breaking the build with musl. Open an issue if the build fails on glibc.