Package management?

Toby Smithe toby.smithe at gmail.com
Wed Sep 6 20:42:23 CEST 2006


On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 20:08 +0200, Stefan Sperling wrote:
> 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.

Well, I wonder why. It's not very easy to work with, nor is it not
cumbersome. Perhaps upstream needs a rework, but I doubt that'll happen.

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

I looked into that once, but only vaguely remember it now. Thanks for
bringing it up again.

> 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.

Excellent. I like that others feel the same way.

> 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.

From what it looks like, and I'm sure you know, this is probably too
much work.

> 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.

I will have to look into ipkg, thanks. 

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