Re: [gentoo-embedded] gentoo-embedded buildroot utility

[Natanael Copa]

On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 15:45 -0700, Ned Ludd wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 23:29 +0100, Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen wrote:
> > On Wednesday 14 March 2007 22:33, Ned Ludd wrote:
> > > Your project seems very similar to that of the former GNAP (sadly the
> > > old GNAP developer is no longer with us)
> > > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/gnap.xml
>
> > Bass and myself are trying to continue GNAP developement. ATM outside of
> > official Gentoo infrastructure. At least I've fixed most reported bugs
> > locally and updated everything so it still builds and runs fine.
>
> Any plans for cross support?
>
>
> > I think Bass is playing around with an idea to make packages somewhat like
> > ipkg packages for OpenWRT.
>
> We did this years ago and stopped it cuz it was a bad idea. I even had
> an tbz2ipkg script and for a brief period of time. We even had
> multi-packages at one point. In the end the only way I saw to move
> forward with proper gentoo intrgration was to accept that our native
> format is .tbz2 and it would be best to work with it. (ala qmerge in
> portage-utils..)

I also tried running ipkg but there were issues so I went for the
previosly mentioned apk-tools.

I originally wanted to use native tbz2's (i think i even tried to
contribute with code) but for various reasons I gave up that.

One of the first things that hit me was that the REDPEND was way to
often wrong. (as long things compiled and run the developer was happy) I
got tired of filing bugs so chosed to rather use the info in NEEDED to
figure out the dependencies for DSO's and then try handle the rest
manually. Things might have changed since then though.

Then in tbz2's you have everything, including doc's, .a files, headers
etc. If you are not going to use this stuff on your end target, why
waste the bandwith? Sure in our part of the world where we have bandwith
this is no big deal but there are part of the world where bandwith still
is expensive and slow. So I wanted to strip this out from the binary
package.

Then there was the problem with package that needed to create a user or
something like that in pkg_postinst. Calling pkg_postinst would need to
read the ebuild which would require bash + loads of eclasses. It could
also be be very handy to have a hook for executing something specific my
distro. This was also lacking in tbz2.

I also wanted several verions of same package but with different
useflags. For example, I wanted a package ulogd with postgres support
and one without. Something similar to openbsd's flavoured pacakges. This
is impossible with current tbz2 format without dealing with 2 different
repositories.

All the above is currently solved with apk-tools.

Natanael Copa

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