Disclaimer.
I never worked with the openmoko toolchain or BB.
It's just my opinion on build systems in general.
Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
---1 "The openwrt build system is much easier to use than OpenEmbedded"
Can Openmoko switch to the openwrt build system?
Of course, we could. However, what problem are we trying to solve here?
Where is the exact problem description? Is it the lack of a UI?
I'd rather fix this problem than go back to where OpenEmbedded started 5
years ago. The ease of use of OpenWRT mainly comes from its simplicity:
If you only target few and very similar devices combined with a limited
set of packages, you can cut a lot of corners at the cost of flexibility
and synergy. There's a ton of features OpenEmbedded provides us that are
missing in OpenWRT.
Taking someone elses build system after you already have one is just
useless pain in your butt.
I would rather learn the craziest build system and make it better than
making any drastic switch.
Btw. All build systems suck. Especially if you use them. ;)
---3 "Openmoko should use normal .deb or .rpm packages, instead of
ipkg/opkg"
This usually includes people saying we should use src rpms / debian
src files to build packages.
That's actually two different questions and I can only comment on one:
3.1. What's the actual problem here rather than a desperate attempt to
unify the desktop and the embedded world more than what's good for
the embedded world? Is it that .ipk are less known than .deb? Is it
the feature of the command line tools or the packaging system per se?
Yes, we can use .debs -- the guys working on Mamona (an alternative
OpenEmbedded-built distribution for the Nokia Internet Tablets) are doing
that with OE. However, before even considering such a switch it's very
important to know what problem we want to solve. We should also consider
that ipkg is more than dpkg, rather something like apt, which performance-wise
is a completely different story on a phone.
I as surprised how well apt and dpkg worked on Maemo. I really liked it.
(Until i sold my Nokia770 to buy a Neo...)
Problem is, dpkg and apt especially is more or less dead code. And much
too complicated. I would expect ipgk to be a bit more hack-friendly.
(Without having ever seen it)
Besides that apt/dpkg works really well, there is probably no person on
this world who understands all apt and dpgk magic.
Especially when it comes to differences between them, and believe me,
there are some...
3.2. I have no experience with building from source packages other than
tarballs. Maybe someone else can comment on that.
Source rpm stink. debian source packages more. (as i said earlier. Every
build system sucks)
I don't see why they should be better than bb. debian is a makefile with
hundreds of makros. And rpm spec files are just hell.
Where i work, our build tools to make .deb are simple shell scripts.
Just good enough.
Every attempt to change a working system is wasted time. (IMHO)
I do't see why it would be worth to change to something probably way too
complicated which will almost certainly be not very nice to use either.
Regards
Tilman
