Package management?

Stefan Sperling stsp at stsp.in-berlin.de
Wed Sep 6 20:08:41 CEST 2006


On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 06:29:54PM +0100, Toby Smithe wrote:
> I would also suggest moving, as from CVS, from the uCLinux monolithic
> build system, wherein everything is built at once, to a more dynamic
> system, where any Makefile can be run without modification. Surely the
> monolithic design was only needed when everything was built into one
> image? 

We've inherited the buildsystem from uClinux. It has nothing
to do with putting things into a single image. It simply is
the way it is. Our whole tree is based on it.

A long time ago I investigated moving to something else,
namely "buildroot"[1].

Back then, my impression was that the amount of work involved in
getting rid of the uClinux buildsystem to change to something
different was enormous. Buildroot is very different.

Another option would be to modify the uClinux build system so it
creates packages along with the root filesystem.
I don't know how much work this would be. It would be optimal
if the changes to the buildsystem were as small as possible,
as we will likely import newer uClinux versions in the future.
Diverging too much from upstream makes upgrading hard.

If you really want to pull this off, I suggest ipkg in favour of apt though.
You could look at the openwrt subversion repository[2] to get an idea of a
buildroot-based system that uses ipkg. Ipkg is suited better for small
systems than apt, and works quite well. Maybe ipkg can somehow be
nicely integrated into the uClinux build system.

[1] http://buildroot.uclibc.org
[2] https://dev.openwrt.org/browser
-- 
stefan
http://stsp.in-berlin.de                                 PGP Key: 0xF59D25F0



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