Development env *on* the neo?

[Shawn Rutledge]

On Dec 4, 2007 2:56 PM, Lars Hallberg <lah at micropp.se> wrote:
> But You don't want to build more than necessary. I have seen gcc, g++,
> make and stuff available for ipkg - but are there any dev versions of
> the libs available? And would it be possible to have stripped libs on
> the neo and install dev libs (and dev env) on the memory card?

Yes all the ipkg's you need exist, but there isn't enough flash to
install them all.  What I did is reformat a MicroSD card to ext2, cp
-a /usr to the card, then modify /etc/fstab to automatically mount the
card on /usr at boot.  Then install task-base-dev and whatever else
you need.  The regular image is not modified much (since nearly all
the new files are installed under /usr), so you can still run without
that card, but if you have it mounted you have all the tools.  (I
suppose it could also be done with unionfs, that would save some
space.)  And if you reflash your phone you just need to recopy /usr to
the card (some stuff will be overwritten, but no need to re-install
all the dev packages if they have not changed) and make the
modification to fstab again.

I also have /usr/root as a "second" home directory so there is some
space for source trees.

I was able to compile Chicken Scheme that way, right on the phone (it
took hours), and am working (slowly) on my Display Scheme GUI.
Chicken has a Scheme-to-C compiler, so you need gcc to get compiled
binaries, and doing that with a cross compiler is even more trouble
than cross-compiling usually is; which is why I wanted to do it on the
phone.  But somebody else managed to cross-compile Chicken plus some
extensions...  someday if nobody else gets around to it, I will try to
generate the bitbake recipes for that.

I managed to compile nvi (because the busybox vi kinda sucks and vim
is kinda big).  I guess in theory you could try emacs if you're into
that.  :-)

I tried to get an svn client on the phone but did not succeed.  That
would be really useful...