Adding Applications To OpenMoko The Right Way

Jeff Rush jeff at taupro.com
Thu Aug 30 01:29:13 CEST 2007


Lars Hallberg wrote:
> And this is something we as third party developers normally don't want
> to do... if I understand correctly.
> 
> Only the core team (and some low level hackers) want to build there own
> image. The rest of us build software and publish the source... maybe
> package it in ipkg package and put them on the web so it's easy for
> everyone to install them to there machine, to replace or add new features.

For myself, I want to build custom images because:

  (a) The OpenMoko distribution is changing rapidly so I need to
      reflash often to keep up.  I don't want to have to go back
      in and manually tweak each time, re-installing my favorite
      ipk files and other non-package changes like adding NFS
      entries to /etc/fstab and permissions to /etc/host.allow.

  (b) I want to -remove- functionality that comes in the OpenMoko
      distribution, because it distracts from what I need or where
      I've written my own replacement.  Can't do that by
      installing .ipk files and indeed it is hard even with OE since
      it lacks a notation to omit a .bb file, in a manner like Gentoo.
      What I mean is that OE lacks something like:
         DISTRO_RDEPENDS = "-openmoko-calculator2"
      to drop out something.  Instead you have to understand the
      entire dependency tree and clone/modify the appropriate package.

This week I'm wrestling with how to get a series of empty system directories
created using OE, for use as custom mountpoints.  I haven't found any examples
of packages doing rootfs filesystem customization so progress is slow.  I've
read all the bitbake and OE docs multiple times and while I'm beginning to
figure it out, there are gaps in the OE docs with a note to add content later,
and there is little "big picture" OE-general or OM-specific material I can find.

-Jeff



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