Mike Frysinger wrote: > so i was tooling along the road thinking about what it would take for people > to sit down and use Gentoo/embedded for the target ... currently we have misc > ways of doing this by hand (install mask/etc...), but it tends to be error > prone and it requires the end user to know more than they should about the > portage environment > > what would help here is a frontend ... something like uClinux or Open > Embedded > where a menu system allows the user to select the packages to install into > the target image and when they're done, they simply type 'make' ... wait a > bit and they're left with images that they can take and flash onto the target > board > > so really, a friendly frontend for the user to select the characteristics of > the system, and then a backend to take that config and use emerge to build > everything and generate an image ... would make it easy to create stock board > descriptions too ... > > what do you guys think ? stupid idea ? good idea waiting for a champion ? > -mike
Good idea. You should take a look at LTIB. It operates very similar to 'make menuconfig' and covers several different platforms (arm, ppc, coldfire) and could be extended to support many more processors and BSPs (board Support Packages). It's functionality might give you some ideas on a more general purpose gui/menu system to support embedded-gentoo on a variety of platforms. Even if you find a reason or two not to use LTIB, looking at LTIB might give you some ideas and code snippets...... The concept of making the package somewhat similar to 'make menuconfig' is very compelling and very comfortable to build images and boot new boards. It is open source:GPL: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/ltib#options http://www.bitshrine.org/autodocs/LtibFaq.html#ref_5 http://www.bitshrine.org/ http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?nodeId=01272686886605 Regardless of which way embedded-gentoo goes, a gui/menu system to unify all/most of the methods/packages/images is a good idea. Organizations and projects that look organized attract more members (& funding). Using a gui/menu system for embedded-gentoo will make it look much more mature as an embedded choice, in my opinion. hth, James -- [email protected] mailing list
