On Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:07:11 +1100 Brendan Simon <Brendan@BrendanSimon.com> wrote: > Does this mean that gnome-vfs, xfonts-base, xorg, xorg-server are core > components for Crush ??? No, but they are among the packages that were released as part of Crush 1.0 and so deserve to be available. Upgrades are going to be hard enough without losing packages - the change in architecture already means a re-installation type upgrade. The reason they are in the shortlist is that they are candidates for changes in Crush to reduce their dependencies compared to Grip. Other packages in Crush won't be sufficiently smaller than their Grip equivalents to make it worthwhile cross-building them. > I hope not. There are some embedded environments, which Crush would be > extremely well suited for, that do not require any GUI libraries or X > servers. Of course. Crush will take such packages directly from Grip, unchanged. > Think about a small http or ftp server. Maybe something that logs > temperatures (or some other real world signals) and the user can > download the logs via http, ftp, snmp, etc. The packages involved in such support do not need particular changes to suit Crush - there are available packages that are suitably small and designed for such environments. I can't make them any smaller by cross-building than I can by putting them into Grip. Cross-building takes a couple of orders of magnitude longer per architecture. The maths is simple. Don't conflate Crush changes with design - packages that are in Debian and which are designed for embedded environments will NOT NEED to be cross-built for Crush because precisely the same package is available in Grip and no further reductions in size can be achieved. Such packages are always a better choice than packages that have to be "coerced" into being embedded-friendly. It's just that there's no point in wasting my time cross-building them. SQLite is a prime example. It takes ages and ages to get the cross-build right and I end up with ZERO changes compared to the package in Grip. No package size reduction, no extra removed files, no dropped dependencies, zero. Why cross-build it? Crush simply takes big Debian packages and tries to switch off various compile time options or mangles the maintainer scripts such that the package doesn't blow up when installed with busybox instead of coreutils. At the moment, that is all Crush can offer. (It wasn't long ago that Crush 2.0 was a complete impossibility, at least this way there is a chance, however slim.) > I think the crush core should be kept as minimal as possible. It is as minimal as possible. So far, the list of packages actually being cross-built is down to a handful. The point is that a package is only shortlisted for Crush if it is too large or too awkward in it's Grip form. All other packages that were in Crush 1.0 will be drawn directly from Grip into the Crush repositories and those that Grip doesn't already have can be easily added. > Identify > the minimal packages and get the core building reliably such that Crush > can be released. Other packages can then be layered on top of the core > as the end application requires. The core of Crush is Grip. What Crush then does is to remove coreutils and perl from Grip, replace with wrappers and busybox and then modify only those packages that absolutely have to be modified. The plan is to base Crush on Grip - any package that you want to use in Crush must either be available in Grip or be a Crush rebuild - such as the ones in the current shortlist. Rebuilds will all have their source package names changed (busybox-crush, gnome-vfs-crush) and their binary packages renamed (libgnome-vfs-crush-2.0-0) and Provides: Conflicts: Replaces: used as appropriate. That gives us full control over the packages that have been shortlisted for changes in Crush. > > I've prepared a shortlist of packages that will need functional changes > > in Crush: ... all other packages in Crush will come directly from Grip without being cross-built as there are insufficient resources to cross-build all of Crush due to the current complexities of cross-building in Debian. Maybe for Crush 3.0 or 4.0 then multiarch will be sufficiently useful to allow a fully cross-built Crush distribution once more. Until then, we either take 99% of our packages directly from Grip, or Crush simply *does not happen*. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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