Hi all, TL;DR : I was talking to Belén at mozfest, a friend of mine who is working on the Yocto Project. She mentioned that it is a toolset for creating embedded Linux distros, built on top of OpenEmbedded/BitBake, and it sounded like it might help to make Firefox OS porting easier, or perhaps just help to organize different FxOS ports. There is more information in her mail below.
Does anyone think this is worth exploring further, or have I misunderstood this? Chris Mills Senior tech writer || Mozilla developer.mozilla.org || MDN cmi...@mozilla.com || @chrisdavidmills > Begin forwarded message: > > Hi Chris, > > I hope you've survived Mozfest and arrived home ok. > > I thought I should send you an email with some Yocto Project stuff after > what we spoke about on Saturday. This is the project website > > https://www.yoctoproject.org/ > > I'll try to give you an overview of the whole thing. The Yocto Project is > just a set of tools for creating customised embedded Linux distros. One of > such tools in a Linux build system, and instead of reinventing the wheel, > the project decided to use one of the existing build systems. The metadata > (the instructions for building a piece of software) is provided by > OpenEmbedded (http://www.openembedded.org). The task executor (that > understands and runs the instructions) is BitBake. > > The OpenEmbedded metadata is organised into recipes. A recipe is a file > with a .bb extension containing a set of instructions to build a piece of > software, for example, the Firefox browser: > > https://github.com/OSSystems/meta-browser/blob/master/recipes-mozilla/firef > ox/firefox_10.0.11esr.bb > > It exists! :) Recipes are organised into layers, which are 'thematic' > collections of recipes. For example, the Firefox recipe above is part of a > layer called meta-browser that also includes a recipe for chromium: > > http://layers.openembedded.org/layerindex/branch/master/layer/meta-browser/ > > There are different types of layers: there are software layers, like > meta-browser. There are BSP layers, that provide support for hardware. One > of those is the meta-geeksphone one: > > http://layers.openembedded.org/layerindex/branch/master/layer/meta-geekspho > ne/ > > The neat thing about OpenEmbedded is that these layers are independent, > which means that hardware support is independent from software, which in > turn means that if you were to create a meta-firefoxos layer to build > FFOS, then you could in theory build it for any of the hardware supported > by OpenEmbedded by combining it with one of the many hardware layers > available. To see them, you can visit > > http://layers.openembedded.org/layerindex/branch/master/layers/ > > And in the 'filter layers' menu on the top right, select the 'Machine > (BSP)' layers. > > This OpenEmbedded Metadata Index is a collection of layers provided by the > OpenEmbedded community. > > We are currently building a web interface to the build system, which > should make it a bit easier to select your layers and configure your > builds. If we are lucky, a first version might be available in April 2015. > > And that's really it. I've cc'ed Paul Eggleton, who is one of the core > engineers of the Yocto Project team at Intel, and a long, long, long time > OpenEmbedded contributor :) He has the answers to all questions, and he is > also a nice guy. > > We have a mailing list, of course > > https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/yocto > > And an IRC channel: > > http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#yocto > > And that's all. > > Get in touch if you have questions. > > Cheers > > Belén > > _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list dev-b2g@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
