Re: Status of Emdebian Grip
On Monday 3. February 2014 20.50.15 Neil Williams wrote:
> >
> > The way I see it (and forgive me if I've got this wrong again because
> > I spend time only occasionally doing embedded stuff before having to
> > do other things for most of the rest of my time) is that the
> > cross-compilation toolchain and the distribution are two rather
> > separate things, are they not?
>
> Entirely separate.
Right.
> > I've used Grip on the Ben NanoNote which has 32MB RAM and 2GB NAND or
> > whatever microSD capacity you can put in the MMC slot.
>
> So there is no need for Emdebian Grip on that device - the microSD is
> easily capable of having a standard Debian install.
Right.
[...]
> multistrap works equally with Debian and Emdebian Grip.
>
> multistrap is about creating a root filesystem from multiple apt
> repositories - it doesn't particularly care what is in those
> repositories as long as apt can use them.
I'll give this another try, then. I have a tool that uses debootstrap to
populate chroots and User Mode Linux partitions, and I made an initial attempt
to use multistrap but it didn't work for some reason. It's good to know that
there's no reason for it not to work and that operator error may have been to
blame.
Trying it again now, it seems to work, although I'll have to update some of my
scripts to pay attention to certain things. Thanks for the encouragement!
> > I must admit that I've found myself wanting the man pages when using
> > Grip on the Ben, and there may well be no useful saving to be had by
> > dropping such things. If various other programs seem slow or large it
> > is quite possible that these are already slow and large and need
> > fundamental changes to work on such small platforms.
>
> Install Debian if you want manpages - you have enough room with microSD
> support.
Indeed.
> > I imagine that "Debian for routers" was what you had in mind for
> > Crush. And so it might be a bit much to expect Grip to fill that gap.
>
> Forget Crush, there is no work going into Crush. Grip was never going
> to be able to fit onto routers. That was the role of Crush but it
> is not a useful effort any longer.
When looking at the Emdebian site [*], I was reminded of Baked, but I imagine
that this is perhaps even less interesting now than either Grip or Crush.
[*] http://www.emdebian.org/emdebian/flavours.html
[...]
> > Is it just a case of doing the same kind of work for each
> > architecture?
>
> The calculations take the time, not the processing of each package. A
> small amount of time is saved per architecture but a lot more time is
> spent calculating which packages are to be processed.
>
> Also, a lot of the calculation time is *manual* - some is scripted but
> there is always a need to fix up corner cases in testing by working
> out which package is broken myself, albeit with help from the edos
> tools.
OK. I think I understand your motivations a bit more now. :-)
[...]
> Emdebian Grip processes packages which have already been natively built
> by Debian. So the compiled files will have been compiled natively. I'm
> not getting into whether the Debian mips/mipsel buildd's are "ancient"
> here but it is those machines which compile the mips/mipsel binaries
> in Emdebian Grip.
Right. My "ancient" remark was just tangential: big memory MIPS machines seem
to be a drop in the ocean in comparison to the vast majority of MIPS devices
shipping today.
> > The things I think are really good about Emdebian are the deployment
> > tools and the toolchain. If the deployment tools - multistrap, mostly
> > - could work with normal archives, then I'm not sure I'd miss the
> > "Gripped" packages. I would miss the apparently more lightweight
> > on-device configuration that you seem to get with Grip, though.
>
> multistrap does work with Debian archives.
>
> Emdebian Grip does not give you lightweight on-device configuration -
> you can do the same by omitting Recommends from your package selection,
> which multistrap does for you.
OK. So I might just as well use plain Debian with multistrap and enjoy the
same benefits of importance to me. I guess this removes any concerns I might
have about Grip going away, at least.
> If you are only using a single repository (Debian unstable or Debian
> testing), then you can just as easily use debootstrap as use
> multistrap. If you have multistrap config for a single suite in Emdebian
> Grip, it's a one line change to point at a Debian mirror instead of an
> Emdebian one.
Right. So some debootstrap magic could also give me the same result.
> > The only potential solution *I* might be able to provide is to help
> > focus documentation, partly to clear up misunderstandings like my
> > own, and partly to be able to lead people to a degree of success with
> > stuff like cross-building. Right now, there are probably three or
> > four sites trying to provide information about such matters, and I'm
> > not sure that the resulting combined information is very coherent.
>
> Please edit the wiki where it would help.
OK, I'll try and make sensible changes.
Thanks for the clarifications and encouragement! I like what the different
Emdebian tools offer, and again, I'd like to say that I appreciate the work
already done in the toolchain, multistrap and Grip.
Paul
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