2020-10-16 –, Main Stream
Robotnix enables a user to build Android (AOSP) images using the Nix package manager. AOSP projects often contain long and complicated build instructions requiring a variety of tools for fetching source code and executing the build. This applies not only to Android itself, but also to projects which are to be included in the Android build, such as the Linux kernel, Chromium webview, MicroG, other external/prebuilt privileged apps, etc. Robotnix orchestrates the diverse build tools across these multiple projects using Nix, inheriting its reliability and reproducibility benefits, and consequently making the build and signing process very simple for an end-user.
Daniel Fullmer is a recent EE PhD graduate from Yale University, where he focused on distributed computation and control. Before this he was a software developer and SRE at various companies. He has been a Nix/NixOS user since 2015, and has been interested in declaratively specifying more aspects of his life using Nix.