David Kuehling wrote: > Currently people have to checkout the full open-wrt toolchain and invest > some hours [...]
I think the whole concept of exposing regular users to this sort of build system, be it OpenWRT, OpenEmbedded, or whatever Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc., do to go from sources to packages, is deeply flawed. Not only is the overhead in terms of computing resources enormous, but users also get exposed to tasks and concepts that are basically distribution-specific internal plumbing. Furthermore, a build from sources has a lot more internal and external dependencies than the installation of a set of binary packages, so the risk of failure is higher. The only case where I saw this approach work was in Gentoo, where most of the ugly bits are hidden from view, making Gentoo look on the outside like your average binary-package-based distribution. Gentoo suffered (and probably still does) from the occasional unexpected dependency problem, though. I've seen the "just make users build OpenEmbedded" approach fail horribly at Openmoko. Things there got a lot better once a group of developers was assigned to take care of the OE side and to produce a repository of binary packages as a result. These people also took care of adding new things to the build or, at least sometimes, of packaging stuff we wrote in Openmoko. That was still a lot of work, but at least it was more contained, and it didn't drag everyone down. Fast-forward to the present. OpenWRT is capable of producing binary packages. Even better, there is Jlime, which is based on OpenEmbedded and thus has a *huge* collection of packages to start with, plus a nicer user interface as an added bonus. One can also generate a binary cross-toolchain for the host, which removes the dependency on OpenWRT/OE/etc. as a means to obtain the cross-compiler. Furthermore, opkg-cl can install packages into the cross-development environment. E.g., if my program needs SDL_gfx, I can just install the binary libsdl-gfx-dev package on my host, and then cross-compile my application. There's also a system I used in my Openmoko days, called "myroot", which takes a set of binary packages and creates a rootfs from them. This made it very easy to have custom images. It shouldn't be too hard to adapt this system for the Ben with a package repository from Jlime or OpenWRT. - Werner _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
