Re: emdebian development model

[Prince Riley <wmarketing3@gmail.com>]

Hello Wookey

The question is does how will emdebian "succeed" as a choice in the embedded Linux development sphere isn't it? 

The relevance to the discussion is 

a) must haves vesus 
b) nice to haves.

At this stage it's best to set everyone's expectations appropriately don't you think? By expectations, I mean an informed, unbiased, market relevant ones. So a bit more outside opinion might help surface these issues a bit more and revel a few blindpots. 

If emDebian is going to gain traction with embedded developers, it has to come to some "minimum" standards in both the build toolchain and the supporting 'packages'. 

If you check in with a few more Emdev engineers, those putting consumer products and firmware out, you'll find that too often embedded engineers and chip makers shudder at using OSD project code as a platform because their dev system based on GNU tools sets which they feel have too steep a learning curve and too many gaps and holes in it. 

That's may sound wrongheaded, but they would rather pay 25K to 50K for a license for a tool with all the pieces in place than muck about with GNU TTY tools these days. All the major em dev houses use GNU toolchains with GUI frontends tools and sell them, so its not very easy to get them to look at anything but something that puts all the code cycle tools together wrapped tight with no heavy lifting.

For example, seldom are embedded development platforms set up without a GUI based tool chain host... those dev who stay with char based TTY (serial consoles) are certianly welcome to that approach. 

But ever since the Eclipse-based dev host platform has taken over on ARM, Intel, and other embedded development ... a TTY dev host and toolchain is a 'last refuge' ...  

If you prefer no emulator, so be it. But anything other than a full emulator that supports the GNU Debugger isn't really worth anyone times these days, cost wise, except proably in India, it's just not worth it  except for the DSP code work where a GUI emulatoris is hard to build and maintain. 

Just take a look at the Beagle board and Gumstik projects. What are the serious developers using.?  You'll quickly see that you won't get many of them to adopt much less even look at this kernel for embedded work unless the tools are all there,idot proof, well supported and fully developed. 

If you ask on a few of the mailing lists for these and other projects, you'll hear back that embedded Debian has a great deal of potential. At the same time it also has a great deal of competition. There are just too many other embedded  kernels with full dev sets already out there to really bother going back to square one.

On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 9:55 PM, Wookey <wookey@wookware.org> wrote:

+++ Prince Riley [2009-04-26 19:34 +0000]:

>    Hello Everyone,
>
>    Martin contributed a basic embedded development use case in  a recent post
>    to the list.

He did, and it was very relevant.

>    I would like to add to that case a few more points.

I'm not quite sure how your points relate to emdebian. Are you
suggesting that we should do something other than provide
toolchains, as we do currently?

Your points seem reasonable to me, apart from this one:

>      * Most important to embedded dev work is a clean, robust toolchain and
>        cross compile process with a GUI development and emulator support
>        (QEMU). I use Eclipse.  

A GUI environment may be nice but it's not a requirement. I don't use
one. Same for emulators. Cross-toolchains and cross-build
management/rootfs creation are all we use on our projects, so emdebian
provides everything we need.

Making a more complete generic debian-based environment to help
embedded devleopment is good thing, but the parts you talked about are
not at all generic and I'm not sure how we'd go about doing that. We
could build hordes of kernels and bootloaders for various machines,
but to some degree others already do that, and someone would need to
take on the admin of such a facility. We are open to suggestions on
this front, but to be honest I think we have enough to do with the bit
we've already bitten off.

Wookey
--
Principal hats:  iEndian - Balloonboard - Toby Churchill - Emdebian
http://wookware.org/


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