Openmoko build / Rebuild vs -dev

[Richard Purdie]

On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 16:00 +0100, Andy Green wrote:
> But I am encouraged you know what I am moaning about, you have a plan
> for it and you are getting paid to work on it.  If Openmoko want to use
> this as the default that will be a big step towards looking and acting
> like a "normal distro".  If I needed to build against X libraries,
> there's no reason at all I have to build X myself.  Someone built the
> libs already and made the includes available... just install that and
> go.  I dunno what those -devs are for otherwise.

The -devs are for on device development and you can do that if the
device is up to the job resource and connectivity wise already (see
Poky's sdk images).

The packaged staging packages and the -dev packages have a lot of
overlap and some have suggested using -dev packages directly but it
isn't quite as simple as that, I won't bore you with the technicalities,
its all in the OE list archives.

> | cd /whereever/the/toolchain/rootfs/is/
> | ar -x tslib-dev.ipk
> | tar -xvzf data.tar.gz
> |
> | if you want to do a quick hack.
> 
> This is the kind of thing but John points out there are other
> dependencies.  And unless it is done through a package system, it'll get
> out of hand with forgetting to update something by the hack method and
> be in a mess.  So I guess it waits on your work.

Agreed. I'm just trying to show this isn't difficult and not as far off
as people think. Package dependencies in the toolchain work in Poky now.
If it works in Poky, making it work in OM is pretty trivial, then it
just needs documenting.

> | My point is that OE isn't deficient as such, there are solutions there,
> | the OE devs are improving them and we mainly need to make them better
> | known about. Throwing a build system away and starting from scratch
> | seems wasteful when the problems are just ones of documentation and
> | communication which can be solved on short timescales if people focus on
> | them.
> 
> It's a multifaceted question... anyway it seems no changes will come in
> the short and probably not the medium term.
>
> Therefore whatever adaptations can be made to make the build process
> more packaged and regular along the lines we talked about would be mega
> welcome.

It really depends who imports the changes into OM since thats the main
obstacle in some cases. I can see all of the things I've mentioned
happening relatively soon, say the next couple of months.

Cheers,

Richard