OE on fedora9

[Mike (mwester)]

Werner Almesberger wrote:
> Andy Green wrote:
>> We just need to be able to install the target packages and -dev on the
>> build host so we can build against them, like any other normal distro.
> 
> Hmm, don't we have this already with opkg-target ? (See John Lee's
> mail from May 29.)
> 
> By the way, what really puzzles me in all this discussion is whether
> you're really the only person on the whole planet who tries to get
> OE to work on Fedora.

I've been using OE on Fedora since Fedora 5; I upgraded one build
machine from F7 to F9 earlier this week; my main server will upgrade
when I have some more free time.  I build the Unslung, SlugOS (BE and
LE), and several Openmoko images regularly, and hack about on some
others from time to time.

My observations over this period of time are that there is nothing
unique about OE on Fedora; in general all the issues that appear to be
unique to Fedora are just due to "bleeding edge" things, and end up
reported by users of other distros as those distros upgrade (an example
occurred recently with F9-beta -- OE build problems that seemed on first
glance to be a beta-type bug in F9 turned out to be gcc issues that
affect all users of gcc 4.3).

At some point, someone in the OE community convinced me to switch my
build machine to Debian, because apparently this would make my problems
go away.  I actually set up a VMware image to test, and found this
generally wasn't true -- F7 vs Debian made little difference for the
issues I was having.  My conclusion is that any assertion that Fedora is
somehow more troublesome than is Debian for OE building may have at one
time been true, but is no longer the case.

A RedHat kernel patch that kills Qemu is the only "black mark" on Fedora
that I still see.  But I don't build locales for development images
anyway, so disabling that in the build actually saves time and avoids
this well-known Qemu/RedHat problem.  (I hear that this may be resolved
in Fedora 9, but I'll believe it when I test it myself!)


> - Werner

Mike (mwester)