Android 4 ICS build source code – minimum system requirements

androidandroid-sourcebuild

I have downloaded Android 4.0.1_r1 source. Upon decompressing the tar, the entire source code is around 9.21 GB in the disk.

The guideline in Google as quoted in http://source.android.com/source/initializing.html

Note: The source download is approximately 6GB in size. You will need 25GB free to complete a single build, and up to 90GB (or more) for a full set of builds.

Background Info
(my system) –
Intel i5 2 processors (4 core) , 8 GB RAM

My host system is Windows Server 2008 and I am trying to run Ubuntu 11.01 (64 bit) desktop with a memory 4GB allocated as Virtual Machine using Oracle Virtual Box. The disk space in the VM is currently around 50 GB.

These are my few small questions :-

What is the difference between single build and "full set" of builds ?
Based on the configuration shared , is it advised for me build Android 4 on a Ubuntu VM or should I consider installing Ubuntu on a separate primary partition with dual boot and start the build on a Ubuntu Host ?
Are there any known recommended minimum system configuration to support building Android 4 or above as I have seen somewhere in the external forums that one requires 16 gigs of RAM to build android. I dont expect an exact to the point answer on this but some minimum quick pointers would do fine for me based on someone's past build experience with Android 4 ICS.

Although it may appear as a duplicate question here , but the old question refers to previous versions of Android with much less source code.

Best Answer

By single build / full set I guess they mean all the variants you can build (engineering build, userdebug, user, etc).

RAM is a pretty serious issue when it comes to build time. Having said that, I've built ICS on a quad core (Intel Core 2 IIRC) with 4 GB RAM. It would take a couple of hours to build a single variant from scratch (with make -j4), and the computer would be pretty much unusable for other tasks in the meantime.

I think an eight core CPU and 16 GB RAM is about as low as I'd want to go on the specifications if I was going to build Android on a regular basis (I'm currently using an eight core Xeon with 20 GB RAM, which has pretty decent build times).

The disk space usage for the full repo with a single variant built is slightly more than 30 GB for me, but that will depend on exactly what you include in your build, so the 25 GB figure you mentioned doesn't sound unreasonable.

Step 1:

Make a new folder and copy over the .apk file that you want to decode.
Now rename the extension of this .apk file to .zip (e.g. rename from filename.apk to filename.zip) and save it. Now you can access the classes.dex files, etc. At this stage you are able to see drawables but not xml and java files, so continue.

Step 2:

Now extract this .zip file in the same folder (or NEW FOLDER).
Download dex2jar and extract it to the same folder (or NEW FOLDER).
Move the classes.dex file into the dex2jar folder.
Now open command prompt and change directory to that folder (or NEW FOLDER). Then write d2j-dex2jar classes.dex (for mac terminal or ubuntu write ./d2j-dex2jar.sh classes.dex) and press enter. You now have the classes.dex.dex2jar file in the same folder.
Download java decompiler, double click on jd-gui, click on open file, and open classes.dex.dex2jar file from that folder: now you get class files.
Save all of these class files (In jd-gui, click File -> Save All Sources) by src name. At this stage you get the java source but the .xml files are still unreadable, so continue.

Step 3:

Now open another new folder

Put in the .apk file which you want to decode
Download the latest version of apktool AND apktool install window (both can be downloaded from the same link) and place them in the same folder
Open a command window
Now run command like apktool if framework-res.apk (if you don't have it get it here)and next
apktool d myApp.apk (where myApp.apk denotes the filename that you want to decode)

now you get a file folder in that folder and can easily read the apk's xml files.

Step 4:

It's not any step, just copy contents of both folders(in this case, both new folders) to the single one

and enjoy the source code...

Android – How to you get the build/version number of your Android application

Use:

try {
    PackageInfo pInfo = context.getPackageManager().getPackageInfo(context.getPackageName(), 0);
    String version = pInfo.versionName;
} catch (PackageManager.NameNotFoundException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

And you can get the version code by using this

int verCode = pInfo.versionCode;

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Android – way to get the source code from an APK file

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Android – How to you get the build/version number of your Android application

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