Hi Hackers,
yesterday I met Phil and Thorsten in Bonn to discuss the future of
our appliance development kit (formerly known as buildroot).
Our existing ADK lacks some needed features and has many different
problems and bugs.
Here is a list of known problems:
* much redundancy and duplicate code
* heavily misuse of stampfiles
* no working rebuild, if firmware configuration is changed via menuconfig
* duplicate package information for WIB, ipkg and ADK (short
description, long description, dependencies, ..)
* complicate build of kernel and kernel modules (too much kernel
config files, all modules are build always, ..)
To solve this problems, I first thought it might be good to take a
look at buildroot-ng from the OpenWrt project. After playing around
with the new system, I recognized, that is really nice and fine for
new users and developers. But finally I decided to not use
buildroot-ng, because it is to complicated to get our stuff into it.
I see no chance to understand all parts of buildroot-ng and to add
the features we need for FreeWRT.
After a long discussion and brainstorming session with Phil and
Thorsten, we decided to cleanup our existing ADK and add all new
features to the existing infrastructure in trunk.
We will implement following changes:
* info.nfo files with all textual information needed for a
package or tool
* Makefile without usage of stampfiles
* clear and consistent targets for tools/toolchain/packages
(clean,fetch,extract,patch,build,fake,package,rebuild,checksum, ...)
* automatic creation of ipkg control files and Config.in
* a shell script will be developed which temporarily creates
a "internal dataware house" (very important, we need more buzzwords ;))
and can either create all metadata for our ADK or a sqlite database for WIB
* the kernel and modules build will be reorganized and simplified
* the $(TOPDIR)/.config file will be automatically split into .cfg/*
files to recognize any configuration changes and only rebuild
needed packages
We are starting with the changes to our ADK in a separate branch,
created out of trunk. I hope we will finish this at the end of
January.
Phil will provide a specification for the info.nfo files for the
package directory in a few days.
If you have any comments or criticism, please don't hesitate to
reply to the list.
Thanks,
Waldemar
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