Mini-Soong

Mini-Soong is a minimalist and incomplete reimplementation of Soong, the Android build system. It is intended to simplify the packaging of parts of Android for Debian. It is not intended to be a complete replacement for Soong.

What is Soong?

The Soong build system was introduced in Android 7.0 to replace Make which at Android's scale became slow, error prone, unscalable, and difficult to test. It leverages the Kati GNU Make clone tool and Ninja build system component to speed up builds of Android.

To learn more about Soong, see https://source.android.com/setup/build.

What does Mini-Soong support?

At the moment, Mini-Soong accepts almost any Soong Blueprint file, but only supports a minimal set of features Soong provides. The only feature of the Blueprint format not supported is the addition of maps.

Feature-wise, only flat Soong files for projects in C, C++ and assembler work. No recursive builds, other programming languages, YACC support, rule generation or any of the advanced features.

Mini-Soong generates a Makefile with three targets: clean, build, install. The install target only installs binaries and shared libraries. Static libraries and headers are not installed. DESTDIR, prefix and libdir are taken into account. When ran on a Debian system with dpkg-dev installed, the system build flags are automatically picked up.