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Re: Embedded Debian, the 5 lb bag.



On Sun Feb 01, 2004 at 11:58:55AM +0200, Lauri Leukkunen wrote:
> That could very well be used for building stage 1.
> 
> >Wow, 500 to 1000 stage 1 packages!  I was expecting the number to be
> >lower.  Are there really that many circular dependencies?
> >
> 
> Oh, I didn't mean that there would be 500 - 1000 stage 1 packages. I 
> meant that we should not have to worry about circular dependencies in 
> the rest of the distribution.
> 
> Stage 1: ptxdist or something similar to put together enough tools to 
> support building stage 2
> 
> Stage 2: "core" set of Debian packages is built and installed, 
> definitely less than 100 components, some packages might be built with a 
> reduced feature set to limit dependencies
> 
> Stage 3: build the remainder of the "buildable from scratch" packages 
> (500 - 1000) and rebuild the modified packages from stage 2.

This is almost exactly how I put together my uwoody stuff with
uClibc.  For stage 1 I used buildroot.  For stage 2 I hacked up a
_ton_ of packages to break circular dependancies until I had
built a sufficient core of stuff that the system became usable.
I built everything by hand so stage 2 was very labor intensive.
By stage 3 I was able to rebuild almost everything (including the
packages I had formerly hacked) using stock debian source.


> How do you plan to compile coreutils for example? It depends (through 
> documentation generation tools) on XFree86. You will still want to have 
> that documentation available for end-users. I'm sure that we need to 
> change some of the stage 2 packages so that the documentation can be 
> switched off. Some of the packages already allow this (somewhat 
> cleanly), but not all. Also the documentation tools should be 
> standardized for stage 2 packages to make this whole thing easier.

Fully agreed.  The single most difficult task I had during stage
2 was trying to satisfy the dependancies of and build roughly 100
different documentation utility packages.  This proved to be a
surprisingly large amount of work.

I consider separating documentation from binaries an essential
task to get debian embedded bootstrapped from source,

 -Erik

--
Erik B. Andersen             http://codepoet-consulting.com/
--This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--



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