Openmoko build infrastructure questions

[Mark Brown]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 08:44:12PM +0100, Andy Green wrote:
> Somebody in the thread at some point said:

> | 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.

There's also Debian which has been available for ARM for many years, yet
there are still people working on creating a derivative specifically for
use on embedded targets:

	http://www.emdebian.org/

working on things like cross build support and the fact that the package
granularity and build options used for destkop and server systems are
often poor choices for embedded targets where resources are more limited.
I think they're still at fairly early stages so far - AIUI they've
managed to build very basic root filesystems for ARM.

Note that this is just a project of some people involved with Debian -
there are at least as many Debian developers I'm aware of (myself
included) who use OpenEmbedded and/or Poky for embedded work and aren't
following emdebian closely.  It's not yet clear to what extent
mainstream Debian is going to be willing to pick up some of the changes
that the emdebian guys are doing.

> 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.

Experience suggests that there's rather more work in there than it may
at first sound - as well as all the portability and cross build issues
in upstream software you tend to end up collecting additional issues
from packaging which also makes assumptions that are bogus for embedded
targets and/or cross-build.