android-tools

Git repository to make it easier to package certain command line utilities provided by android-tools.

Motivation

Many Linux distributions have a package called android-tools which ships essential Android command line tools like adb or fastboot. Sadly the upstream build system for those tools is rather complex and doesn't allow building the command line tools only.

Linux distributions therefore mostly ship their own build systems for building the command line utilities. This repository aims to make packaging of android command utilities easier by providing a simple CMake based build system and a ready-to-use tarball which doesn't require cloning all of the required git repositories manually. Besides this makes it easy to collect all patches required to build standalone Android command line utilities in a central place.

Status

Currently the following tools are supported:

• adb
• fastboot
• mke2fs.android (required by fastboot)
• simg2img, img2simg, append2simg
• lpdump, lpmake, lpadd, lpflash, lpunpack
• mkbootimg, unpack_bootimg, repack_bootimg, avbtool
• mkdtboimg

The build system itself works quite well and is already being used for the Alpine Linux android-tools package which I maintain.

I personally don't use any android-tools except adb and fastboot. Thus my motivation to add support for additional tools is rather low at the moment. However, patches adding support for new tools in a clean way are welcome. Additionally, patches needed to make the software compile on other Linux distributions are welcome as well. Please create new patches using git format-patch --no-numbered --no-signature ….

Dependencies

The following libraries are required by android-tools:

1. libusb
2. PCRE
3. Google Test
4. protobuf
5. brotli
6. zstd
7. lz4

Python 3 is optionally needed as a run-time dependency in order to use the mkbootimg, unpack_bootimg, and repack_bootimg scripts which are all written in Python.

Additionally the following software is required at compile-time:

1. A C and C++ compiler (either GCC >= 10.X or clang)
2. The Go compiler
3. CMake
4. Perl

Currently the build system doesn't check whether all of these are installed.

Installation

Source tarballs containing an already patched version of all vendored dependencies are available on the GitHub Release Page.

These tarballs should be used for packaging and general installation. After the tarball was downloaded and extracted android-tools can be build and installed as follows:

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
$ make install

Generating tarballs

New source tarballs can be created from the Git repository using:

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make package_source

Before a new release is uploaded a new git-tag(1) should be created for the release. Afterwards the tarball can be uploaded to the GitHub Release Page.

See also

The build script for android platform tools by Anatol Pomozov which inspired this project. Most definitions in the CMakeLists.txt have been copied from Anatol's ruby script.