Good morning;

I've been lurking on IRC and the mailing list for a little bit now but
I have not yet been able to piece together how gentoo-embedded is put
together.  I have a number of questions that I am wondering about.

1. What is the intended flow for putting together a rootfs for a
target?  ie. What are the steps required from the 1000ft viewpoint?
2. How should I set up your cross toolchain?  Personally, I'm partial
to Dan Kegel's crosstool for building my toolchains, are they
sufficient.
3. Where do I get the gentoo-embedded portage tree?  Is it integrated
with the main gentoo portage tree.

In the absence of understanding on my part, I can only make statements
about what I would want out of the toolset.  From my point of view
what I am looking for is the following steps to build my embedded
rootfs:

0. Start with any Linux host as a development platform (May no be
gentoo).  Ideally it would be great if it worked with Cygwin also.
1) Build a cross toolchain and install it somewhere shared (like /opt)
2) Build the rootfs toolset (portage) and install it also.  (Or use
the natively installed portage)
2.5) Install portage tree somewhere shared
3. Create a 'staging area' directory as an install target for all cross ebuilds.
4. Cross compile end merge all of the ebuilds desired into the staging area
The staging area should now be mountable as a rootfs on the target
5. Build a rootfs image (jffs2, initrd, etc) by filtering out some of
the files that will not be needed on the target (headers, man pages,
etc)

As I see it, there shouldn't be any need for build tools in the
staging area (gcc, binutils, portage tree, etc) and it should be easy
to create a new staging area from scratch.

Disclaimer: I realize that it takes quite a bit of hubris to make
demands on a project I know almost nothing about and have little
contact with so I beg forgiveness.  :-)  Seriously, the above is
simply what I'm looking for and I'm wondering is how does it compare
with what gentoo-embedded is doing.

Finally, how should I get started?  Specifically, I've got ARM and
PowerPC platforms with a x86 host.  I can get the experimental stage
tarballs; how do I cross-compile ebuilds?

Thanks,
g.

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