Re: Word of Emdebian at LinuxWorld Exp (London) ?
On Thu Oct 30, 2003 at 11:11:30AM -0800, Dan Kegel wrote:
> David Schleef wrote:
> >There's another fundamental problem, which is that packages built
> >against uClibc really need to be built against a complete uClibc
> >environment. Cross-compiling uClibc packages (i386-glibc ->
> >i386-uclibc) works sometimes, but has most of the general cross
> >compiling issues.
>
> Which are eminently solvable, I might point out.
> Only wimps are afraid of cross-compiling :-)
Solvable, but speaking from the experience of having been
building cross-compiling toolchains and root filesystems for
uClibc targets for a few years now, it can involve a lot of work
and a lot of little gotcha. Even for packages that compile,
configure scripts have often tried to compile and execute stuff
for the target, and then silently include bunches of app bloating
workarounds.
Take a look at the openembedded project. A fine project, but
they have sure had to do a _lot_ of work to make configure
scripts cross compile well, and have eventually resorted to
simply stuffing pre-canned configure test results into their
build system....
> Oh, ok, it *is* hard to take an existing build system like Debian's
> and make it cross-compile-clean; each package needs updating.
> It's a can of worms, as David points out.
>
> For what it's worth, I've been very impressed with ptxdist,
> a tiny distribution devoted to the idea that *every*
> package should cross-compile. You *can* compile
> ptxdist natively, but only by using the native toolchain
> as if it were a cross-compiler!
Yup. ptxdist is a derivitive of the uClibc buildroot system. We
talked about merging the projects at one point. So yes it is a
fine example. The openembedded project is also one to watch
closely. It is the next generation from kergoth and the other
openzaurus folk (where openzaurus itself was a next generation
derivitive of the tuxscreen buildroot, which is another uClibc
buildroot derivitive).
There are of course plenty of build-everything-from-source
embedded and non-embedded distros out there. A fine example
of the breed is uClinux-dist
http://www.uclinux.org/pub/uClinux/dist/
which also includes a linux kernelconf menu based package
selection system (similar to ptxdist). But it supports a
much larger range of sytems (both mmu-full and mmu-less)
and includes a very nifty product specific support mechanism
that makes it easy to rebuild a wide range os things.
-Erik
--
Erik B. Andersen http://codepoet-consulting.com/
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