On Wed, 2010-03-10 at 21:52 +0000, Neil Williams wrote: > > http://www.emdebian.org/grip/ > > Why rebuild? What changes are you making to the packages? (Answers to > questions like this should go to the debian-embedded@lists.debian.org > mailing list, not debian-devel.) > > (IMHO - and possibly a lot of other DD's - the benefits of building > packages for a specific machine ala gentoo with no other changes is > often heavily over-rated.)
In my case it was to workout what and how things held together, also to understand the graphic software stack in greater detail (X, window managers, graphics, widgets etc.) and USB client/USB server stacks as I want to play around with my beagleboard as an actively passive device where it either mimics a USB device (say a virtual keyboard on a touch-screen) or directly passes attached USB devices through to an attached PC (eg, USB-HD and USB-keyboard plugged into the beagleboard become available to PC that is attached to the host port). > > > ... where is all this documented? > > It's not. > > Documenting it means keeping it correct and that's just too much work. > > > has anyone actually done this > > Yes. Me - I was cross-building the entire chain too. It took me the > best part of a year to get through 200 packages. i.e. SERIOUSLY > reconsider precisely how many packages you want to rebuild and how many > NEED to be rebuilt. Ouch! Having done some more research and understanding things "debian" a little better as a packaged system as opposed to just getting and compiling source (which can be done, but then disallows packaging per-say) I can see why things are done this way. However... I'm still a little surprised that there is no overall "master build system/program" so that all the hard work you and others have done to build the packages from scratch will have to be done all over again if a brand new processor and/or instruction set hits the market, but I guess that is quite a rarity and before it could be targeted by debian either the GCC toolchain would need to be changed and/or a new compiler built by the hardware manufacturer. Would I be correct in assuming that in most devices based on debian that the OEM would take the basic packages (for the CPU type arm/x86/etc.) then potentially change the kernel compile options, decide on the graphic packages/stack (Qt/GTK/MeeMo/if applicable) and maybe re-compile some packages to take into account differing sub-cpu types (arm7, A8, etc.) > > > Neil Williams > ============= > http://www.data-freedom.org/ > http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ > http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ > Thanks for you help -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-embedded-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/blu0-smtp24f1d67805ab7424a48e0c98...@phx.gbl