On Jan 26, 2010, at 9:43 AM, Ove Kaaven wrote:

> Jeremiah Foster skrev:
>> On Jan 25, 2010, at 22:27, Ed Bartosh wrote:
>> 
>>> 2010/1/25 Jeremiah Foster <jerem...@jeremiahfoster.com>:
>>>> There are other build tools which are better documented and more flexible 
>>>> than sdbmock. Debian has a complete toolchain which is obviously good at 
>>>> building debs and is completely open and well supported.
>>> Interesting. Can you point me out to the one, which supports scratchbox?
>> 
>> Why do you need scratchbox to build debs? Why not just use the debian 
>> toolchain? I know you don't want to learn perl, but hey, it works for 
>> debian. 
> 
> The Debian tools are not really designed for cross-compilation, they're
> meant to run inside the target environment.

Yeah, this seems to be the key differentiator between Maemo's build system and 
Debian's. Still, there was a SoC project last year in which we could have 
participated to help shape the debian build process to more closely match 
Maemo's. No one was interested.

> That target environment also
> needs a full complement of Debian tools, including compilers. The reason
> it works for Debian is because they have a LARGE farm of dedicated,
> donated machines of various architectures: http://db.debian.org/machines.cgi

I find it fascinating that a Free Software operating system, without a very 
formal form of governance, without any assets of its own aside from SIP, run 
completely by volunteers, has a larger build farm than the world's leading 
handset manufacturer. 

> If someone builds a farm of Maemo devices (running on ARM, of course)
> that they want to dedicate to running buildds, then that might work.
> Otherwise, the Debian tools need to be run inside a simulated target
> environment, and the only simulated environment known to run Maemo (and
> that runs reasonably fast) is probably scratchbox...

What about tools like qemu and dpkg-cross? Can't they be used to build debs 
without scratchbox? And my goal is not to necessarily get rid of scratchbox, 
but rather enable alternatives to the current build toolchain. Mer builds 
packages on OBS - why can't we do that for Maemo?

Jeremiah

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