Re: State of emdebian / Future plans
Hello Janek,
On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 04:10:14PM +0000, Wookey wrote:
> > Are some people still working on this project or is it dead? We would
> > like to know if there is still some work going on and what the future
> > plans are - looking through the archives seems that no one really
> > manages the homepage and its archives (full of spam).
It depends pretty much on what you mean with "this project".
Wookey provides the toolchains. @Wookey: Does "as long as jessie is supported"
mean that stretch provides cross-compiler sources or binaries out of the box?
To my knowledge, SLIND [1] was the first Emdebian implementation. It provided
cross-build rules for a few packages and stripped some files (e.g., docs) and
dependencies (notably, perl ones) not necessary for embedded systems.
Neil has pushed the effort on making packages cross-buildable out of the box
[2, 3]. He released Emdebian distributions [4]. Grip provided stripped Debian
binary packages. Crush provided cross-built binary packages. The effort has
been abandoned due to lack of resources.
Meanwhile, SLIND's cross-building effort has also been abandoned for new
projects, due to the same reasons, in favor of native building. Also, a build
system has been added, and the project has been open-sourced as Isar [5]. It
relies on mainstream tools like BitBake, dpkg-buildpackage, multistrap and meta
layering similar to that of Yocto for easier maintenance of upstream code.
ELBE [6] is a tool for building root filesystems from apt repositories based on
an XML description.
Meta-debian / Deby cross-builds Debian sources using the Yocto infrastructure.
They contribute to OSS projects, including Debian [8].
In other words, companies continue using Debian in their products [9], it's too
valuable to re-invent it in-house. The efforts are somewhat distributed ATM,
although we are talking how we could improve things. A central policy and
co-ordination are currently missing, and I find that ok for the time being --
implementation and persistence first. So, if you would like to use Debian for
your projects -- that's a good choice, and there are tools for that; at the
same time, it's still a long way to a bigger and more organized community. If
we could help, please let us know.
Regarding the web pages -- I had the problem that there were several versions
of the same page (e.g., on building cross-compilers, or about multistrap), some
of which were outdated. @Wookey: Is this list an appropriate place to provide
suggestions on that?
References:
1. http://www.emdebian.org/News/2006/20060225.html
2. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2007/11/msg00118.html
3. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/02/msg00520.html
4. http://www.emdebian.org/emdebian/flavours.html
5. https://github.com/ilbers/isar
6. https://elbe-rfs.org/
7. https://github.com/meta-debian/meta-debian
8. http://elinux.org/images/e/ef/ContributingOSS_Yoshitake_Kobayashi-r3.pdf
9. http://elinux.org/images/0/09/ELC-2017-isar.pdf
With kind regards,
Baurzhan.
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