Re: Re: Renaming or forking familiar?

Hi Jamey,

On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 16:19, Jamey Hicks wrote:
> We think that the Familiar name has value, and we would like to continue
> using it for a user-centered distribution targeted at handheld
> computers.

Thanks for clarifying. I fully agree with that.

> For developers, there is the unstable feed. Although it is great to be
> able to build the whole release from source using OE, we think we need
> developers to be able to build just their own applications if they
> prefer, using devel packages from the release.

As stated earlier, the problem I have with this approach is that the
packaging process is, generally speaking, not documented and cannot be
easily reproduced by others.

For official packages I'd prefer them to be built using a build system
(not necessarily OE) that has a well defined package description format
allowing automated building/packaging.

For third party developers a cross compilation SDK should be made
available with every release.

> This is also necessary
> in order to produce update packages for a release.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I believe you could much more easily
keep a frozen tree of OE (and bitbake) and only touch individual .bb
files (or patches etc.) in order to build updates.

> One of the things that came up is the need to update the ipaq cluster.
> Ideally, Familiar would contain enough packages, built for Familiar or
> provided by Debian, that anyone with an ipaq with sufficient storage
> could use it for native development.

To my knowledge there are basically three major bugs in OE that break
native development.

1) linux-libc-headers aren't packaged
   http://bugs.openembedded.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114
2) libc.so contains errors
   http://bugs.openembedded.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43
3) .la and possibly .pc (pkgconfig) files may point to wrong (build
   time) locations. I expect this to be a systematic error which I
   believe can be fixed in a generic fashion for all packages.
   This would also fix problems people have reported with OE built SDKs.

Also, as (binutils) has been reported to be broken. This needs to be
checked.

Rene
Received on Tue Jun 21 2005 - 15:11:16 EDT