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Comment by 4thguy | Hacker News Reader

As I read down the readme, I kept saying to myself "ok, that's reasonable," right up until I saw the 300GB free space requirement to build the image. Is that really what is needed to build an image for a phone or is this a one-off?

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My understanding is that yes Android build requirements are... significant. Given that a gentoo system can self-host in like <10% of that space, I am somewhat mystified how it got here, but yes that's "normal".

My x220i w/ i3-2310m and 8gb ddr3 can compile gentoo from a stage 1.

Android's build system must be hopelessly fucked to require the specs it does.

Android build system is a heavy Rube Goldberg machine, it's amazing it even works at all

Android is a heavy Rube Goldberg machine, it's amazing it even works at all.

android-latest-release branch (Android 16 QPR2) for lunch target aosp_cf_x86_64_phone-trunk_staging-eng (Cuttlefish emulator):

> du -hs --exclude /aosp/android-latest-release/out /aosp/android-latest-release

132G /aosp/android-latest-release

> du -hs /aosp/android-latest-release/out

127G /aosp/android-latest-release/out

So ~130GB each for the compiled artifacts and the source code. It's heavy, and at times can easily fill 64GB of RAM during the build.

Yes, that's normal for an Android build. Maybe even on the lightweight side as far as build requirements. I agree that it's an absurd about of space.

Android uses like 7 build systems and repo is like 50 submodules deep.

Compiled android once ~10 years ago, remember it taking at least half a day. Really helped me appreciate how many things go into it.

Building Android is heavy, and so is Chrome.

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