*) OE is really fiddly. It's got too many options and overrides and schemes to do things. It's got its own packaging system and a bunch of other stuff.
This is true. Although it may be that all this stuff is actually necessary to deal with all the problems of cross-compiling 'everything'. But it certainly is heavy going to start with.
I think the basics can be kept simple. A good system just doesn't make you set 100 things before you get started. This is, amongst other things, good marketing. Makes it easy to get people up and playing with a working system... you could easily include that in a magazine article.
*) Also, OE just grabs esentially random collections of packages. Debian, OTOH, has nice groupings of packages that are pretty well taken care of and, hopefully, integrated with one another. This integration is valuable.
That's certainly my feeling. I _hope_ that the consistency of Debian packages can make the build system a lot simpler, but this is by no means a certainty.
Unfortunately, I think you are right. At least by using debian packages, you have a known good base, though, that should even work on the architectures you are targeting.
*) .debs and the debian source package format aren't really ideal for embedded work. I'm working on a pretty large (space requirements) embedded system, and even that doesn't take too long to build. Going through .debs starts to feel like a hack. The source format doesn't work as well as it could because the diffs are all bundled up together, rather than in patch sets.
Are you saying that you don't want packages at all - just a big rootfs? I think the modularisation of packages is still useful for embedded work. Generally using ipkg is more suitable than dpkg, but the exact form of the packages is not critical.
Depends what you are doing I guess, but on the system I'm working with, I don't care about keeping track of packages. I just want to create the target system and be done with it, but I want to be able to do it from sources with a known toolchain, so that we can put the whole mess on a DVD and be able to come back and use it 5 years from now if needs be (hopefully).
I could see having a package system as a plus for some purposes, but I don't think it should be an integral part of the base system.
-- David N. Welton davidw@eidetix.com