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were several versions of the same page (e.g., on building cross-compilers, or about multistrap), some of which were outdated.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.
