Openmoko build infrastructure questions

[Werner Almesberger]

Richard Purdie wrote:
> The problem is everyone has a different expectation of a development
> environment. Some want an IDE, some want their own editor, some just
> want a shell prompt. The trick is finding something that can please the
> most people.

Indeed :-) The thing is that, at the end of the day, the common
denominator for almost everything is a Makefile. So that seems to be
a good point to make that switch in a way that's transparent to most
of the developers.

No matter how great OE is, the less I need to worry about it when I
only need its services, but don't intend to change its shape, the
better.

> I'd love to see the meta-toolchain environment script expanded to add a
> shell function which has the right configure options in it!

That's probably a good approach. I was thinking more in terms of
documentation, but "executable documentation" is great to have for
many reasons.

> With Poky we've simply said we'll only deal with autotool'd packages
> since they're at least predictable even if you dislike autotools. The
> IDE can generate dummy boilerplate so its not that bad from an app
> developer perspective.

I think insisting on replacing the build scripts of the code I'm
working on would already be one step too aggressive. If a package
cross-compiles without a fight, or if it's easy to adjust, the
cross-build environment shouldn't try to impose its own style.

I haven't noticed our meta-toolchain-derived toolchain doing anything
like this, so the direction looks good to me so far.

> For reference I wrote meta-toolchain in a effort to show that OE can
> ease the development environment side of things and your comments above
> show it really does work :).

Indeed it does. Thanks ! ;-)

- Werner