kati 0.0.20250520

An experimental GNU make clone

kati

kati is an experimental GNU make clone. The main goal of this tool is to speed-up incremental build of Android.

Currently, kati does not offer a faster build by itself. It instead converts your Makefile to a ninja file.

Development

Building:

$ make ckati

The above command produces a ckati binary in the project root.

Testing (best ran in a Ubuntu 22.04 environment):

$ make test
$ go test --ckati
$ go test --ckati --ninja
$ go test --ckati --ninja --all

The above commands run all cKati and Ninja tests in the testcases/ directory.

Alternatively, you can also run the tests in a Docker container in a prepared test enviroment:

$ docker build -t kati-test . && docker run kati-test

If you are working on a machine that does not provide make in the same version as kati is currently compatible with, you might want to download a prebuilt version instead. For example to use the prebuilt version of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS:

  $ mkdir tmp/ && cd tmp/
  $ wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/m/make-dfsg/make_4.2.1-1.2_amd64.deb
  $ ar xv make_4.2.1-1.2_amd64.deb
  $ tar xf data.tar.xz
  $ cd ..
  $ PATH=$(pwd)/tmp/usr/bin/:$PATH make test

How to use for Android

For Android-N+, ckati and ninja is used automatically. There is a prebuilt checked in under prebuilts/build-tools that is used.

All Android's build commands (m, mmm, mmma, etc.) should just work.