The Tools [LWN.net]

The Tools

Posted Feb 9, 2011 18:04 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784)
In reply to: Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters) by dowdle
Parent article: Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters)

One reason for people favouring the Debian tools and packaging system has been the relative convenience of being able to bootstrap a distribution, although I would argue that the tools don't really go far enough to permit cross-bootstrapping without messing around with things like QEMU, even though projects like Emdebian are presumably meant to do so. Stuff like debootstrap, although now complemented by febootstrap (for Fedora), at least points to a more sane solution for getting people started than some of the alternatives (OpenEmbedded springs to mind).

That was one of the perplexing things about OpenMoko: there were a bunch of different approaches, but they were all suboptimal. There was the MokoMakefile which did manage to build things, but then complained loudly if run a second time (if, for example, it didn't work the first time); then there was some kind of OpenEmbedded affair which probably needed gigabytes of disk space and days of build time. For many people, what was really required was just a sandbox running natively (not under emulation) on the development machine (not on the device) which gave a basic sense of the constraints of the device, populated with the libraries and tools that would be present on the device (because the sandbox would be populated in the same way). Bringing up a nested X server would provide enough "emulation" without any need for fancy boilerplate graphics showing the actual device casing, LEDs, and so on.

I regard it as a positive sign that there is a Debian Lenny root image for GTA04.

The Tools

Posted Feb 10, 2011 23:07 UTC (Thu) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link] (1 responses)

Bootstrapping an exsting debian arch is dead easy, as you point out. Cross-bootstrapping a new one or a variation, or a new-compiler rebuild is still very difficult, but linaro is doing good work on that front. Emdebian did useful work on this front, but that work showed that without suffient buy-in upstream it was a massive job to maintain. The linaro/ubuntu tie-up has provided that upstream buy-in, so people actually care about cross-buildability as well as native building, and painless developer tools to use that functionality. This stuff, combined with multiarch to remove a whole boatload of cross-path-pain and general bodgery should mean that cross-bootstraping actually becomes something that works, as does cross-building when necessary/useful.

In the meantime of course powerful new arm boxes and convenient form-factors make native-building dead easy too, just like it is on your x86 desktop.

Expect to see some interesting stuff in this area over the next year. It should all be rather spiffy :-)

The Tools

Posted Feb 11, 2011 21:28 UTC (Fri) by xxiao (guest, #9631) [Link]

I tried bootstrap debian from source to no avail, i.e. build debian from source for a new chip, just those perl and texinfo related stuff for setting up the initial native rootfs alone are very difficult...
of course if you want to debootstrap a binary distribution for supported chip it's really easy.