I may have already mentioned this once, but I don't see any harm in
doing it again.
Have any of you used Kuroo ? This is a similar idea - although not
nearly as far along - for managing embedded system builds with portage.
Are there any developer libraries for interfacing with Portage that are
fairly available - [Java, C, C#, ... I've really never used python]
********
As an gentoo user & embedded developer, I can see the massive benefits
to both general purpose package management, as well as build automation
for embedded systems, through the use of portage & emerge.
Portage has a major advantage and should really be asserting itself more
in the world of embedded package management. The crossdev utility is by
far an excellent piece of work - I use it for practically every
toolchain now.
However, there are a few questions that I've been asked several times -
(mostly by my boss), such as -
i) why not just use OpenWRT, which will generage a filesystem image,
download your sources, _and_ build a kernel automatically...
ii) why not use that thing from openembedded.org ? ... same idea as above...
Why not? because I think that portage is clearly better, the source is
more current, dependencies are better resolved, more flexible, etc.
What appears to be a constant theme, in terms of what the 'competition'
has on gentoo-embedded, is an easy-to-use build system.
The good news is, I've actually done some extensive work on this!
I've been working on a _single_bash_script_ that is exceeding 2000+
lines of code. What it does, is interactively help the user set up a
buildroot and manage portage overlays for different targets. That is, a
stage1 filesystem, a local portage tree, a cross-toolchain, etc.
The reasons for this are:
1) portability across linux vendors (i.e. the developer does not need to
run gentoo natively, only needs to chroot to get the advantages of portage)
2) separability from the main os - none of the host
/etc/portage/package.* files are not adjusted - so there is practically
nothing changed at all on the host machine except for the addition of a
new buildroot directory.
3) extensibility - I'm seriously considering developing user interfaces,
libraries, etc, all to make this _more_developer_friendly_ ... even a
context free grammar for all possible buildroot / configuration
operations. Likely any extensions to this will be done either in C
(libs), Java, or C# ... maybe even an extension of some kind for
Eclipse. This could be somewhat similar to Kuroo
4) enables embedded developers to simply manage their embedded devices
using a portage overlay, in a very portable way.
5) easy generation of a root filesystem
By basically mounting or systematically copying/destroying key portage /
crossdev / configuration files to the chroot upon chroot (mount -n -o
bind, etc). This (will / has) enabled the same buildroot to be used for
_several_ configurations (portage overlays), targets (with versioned
toolchains), as well as developer and stable profiles. I'm working in a
way to automate compressed configuration backups as well, organized by
date. Hopefully, this will all be SVN friendly too - except for device
nodes of course :P
The user is interactively prompted to select a target / toolchain, etc,
these are all selected based on __tested__ compilations on each
architecture using crossdev - a sort of build matrix like that from Dan
Kegel.
There is a list of toolchains for each architecture that were cleanly
built using crossdev. I've only done a fraction of the build automations
for X86, and it took something like 2 days.
What's really interesting about this script, is that i've made the
script copy itself to the chroot, upon every chroot, but with a
different name. So when the program chroots, it actually calls itself
upon transition with
LIST=of \
ENVIRONMENT=variables \
chroot ${DIR} ${PROG2_NAME}
which allows for a somewhat 'seamless' routine carryover - that is if
the program needs to install a toolchain, it will pass certain
environment variables once it moves to the chroot, etc.
I think that this could be a pretty good addition to the embedded
development utilities for gentoo.
Please inform me if you have any interest in this project at all, I
would be very happy to have any assistance or input.
~/Chris
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