Packaging third-party applications (Was: Meta Toolchain Release (2008 May))

[Andy Green]

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Somebody in the thread at some point said:
| Andy Green wrote:
|> Hi yourself... I guess you must have started using Openmoko build system
|> then because last time we spoke about it you were avoiding it same as me
|> - -- for the same reasons.
|
| I think you misunderstood me there - I wasn't referring to myself when
| I mentioned the angelic patience :-)  (*)

OK then :-)  just people might have gotten the wrong idea :-)

| For me, bitbake is a great tool for distribution makers. I say that it's
| a great tool for them because they seem to be happy with it. When they're
| happy and make happy little pre-compiled packages for me, I'm happy as
| well. And I'm even happier if I never ever have to touch bitbake ;-)
|
| (*) If you must know, I was thinking of Raster. Although the deprecations
|     he uttered on IRC while struggling to use bitbake as a twisted
|     substitute for make seemed somewhat less angelic (-:C

Yeah I saw him myself fidgiting and complaining through endless rebuilds
to pointlessly regenerate for himself what was already sitting in a
package in the OM repo.

|> What you should have said is: ''Also, having a toolchain that makes it
|> easy to cross-build from PACKAGES will help a lot towards people not
|> even wanting to BUILD STUFF THAT IS ALREADY BUILT AND USABLE.''
...
| Yes, if the package has already been properly openembeddified and is
| part of someone's build process, sure, you can just grab the binary.
| But often enough, you'll find that this hasn't happened yet, and you
| probably want to try it out before lobbying its addition to the
| daily build.

Even if you build something weird it would just mean you should package
your dependent stuff in OE package first, and then install it into the
package-based toolchain the same using your local packages so you can
link against it.  It's no different with any packaging system like RPM:
if you planned on passing this new package around, you had to package
the dependencies anyway.

Packaged-based toolchain is then a complete stand alone solution for
normal devs.  For the people who build the packages in the main repo
from scratch and do have to have a complete set of build dependencies on
their build box, this bitbake or mokomakefile stuff that wants to build
an entire subdistro on their host is actually useful.  But how many
people need to drink that bleach?  Three?  Everyone else can have a
happy life building package-based.

- -Andy
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