Openmoko build infrastructure questions

Andy Green andy at openmoko.com
Wed Apr 16 21:44:12 CEST 2008


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Somebody in the thread at some point said:
| This discussion starts to go around in circles :/
|
| On Wednesday 16 April 2008 21:15:00 Andy Green wrote:
|> WHY is what we are doing so DIFFERENT from what normal desktop distros
|> set out to provide that we need "a powerful build system
|
| Try to run a stock distro on your Neo. Then come back and lets talk.

That's the wrong way around.  Fedora for example is starting to have
cross builds for ARM.  We can follow their progress and assess if we
could work together.

Intel made an offer to provide a port for Openmoko of Moblin / Ubuntu
mobile AIUI.  With their resources we can believe it will work out, we
would have input into how we want it to work out.

So there are ways forward from where we are today and we are not locked
in past the short term, we should seriously consider what it will cost
us in delay and staffing the "re-education camps" and what it can gain
us in a larger developerbase that is ready to hit the ground running.

|> Why do we need that handicap of
|> a special "hard to learn" stumbling block for anyone that wants to
|> contribute?  What is it doing for us that can't be done with a normal,
|> existing, well maintained normal distro with a lot of users who know how
|> to package and so on already?
|>
|> "Cross build" is the only answer I understood.
|
| Then please reread the other mails or start to learn a bit more about OE.
| Hints: Package granularity, embedded-specific patches, easy to build from
| source, automatic dependencies, source distribution, ...

Maybe these terms have special meaning for you: "automatic dependencies"
and "source distribution" and "easy to build from source" and "package
granularity", but rpmbuild / Fedora has them all to my understanding of
the words and no doubt Ubuntu too.  "embedded-specific patches" can be a
special sauce maybe, but no reason another distro can't have them from
OE too, or we can deviate from their packages case by case.

|> 4. We suddenly realize we're just making packages for a "PC", and we
|> should use a normal distro with some solution for cross, and not learn
|> and force everyone else to learn a big bunch of special case stuff.
|
| You can repeat this as much as you want, but it won't become the truth.
| A phone is NOT a PC. Yes it has similar power nowadays, but that's
about it.

Just have to agree to disagree then, it's pretty obvious from my side.
In any event Moblin / Ubuntu Mobile also appear to treat it as a
cut-down special case, so that should be good.

- -Andy
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