Adding Applications To OpenMoko The Right Way

[pHilipp Zabel]

On 8/30/07, pHilipp Zabel <philipp.zabel at gmail.com> wrote:

Sorry 'bout that, hit the space key with the wrong UI element in focus.

> On 8/30/07, Jeff Rush <jeff at taupro.com> wrote:
> > 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.

Understanding the entire dependency tree is as easy as calling ipkg
whatdepends on the package you want to remove or ipkg -test -recursive
remove and find out what task package pulled it in (in this case it's
task-openmoko-pim, built by packages/tasks/task-openmoko.bb).
That took me five seconds to find out, with one invocation of ipkg an
one of grep on the tasks directory.

cheers
Philipp

> > 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
> >
> >
>