Thanks for those comments and help ! /My/ concerns are that I will invest time and effort in learning PTXdist only to find after several days that it does not do what I need after all, or is too inflexible or difficult to configure, hence my interest in having "up front" documentation that shows at a glance how to achieve frequently needed tasks, and how to tweak settings to fit in with system and hardware requirements.
IMHO a Wiki is one of the best ways of getting 'howto's documented from a user community. As far as I know the Handhelds.org Wiki is versioned, and still has content on it that I wrote in 2002, athough dates have been updated due to a server move. Perhaps you could advise on how PTXdist compares with a rootfs build system I used at a previous company (source not available, but based on make). This is what made me take interest in PTXdist !! - built user apps, libraries, drivers; kernel packages; open-source packages (including buildroot) - 'user' sources were local files in project tree, packages retrieved from server tarball directory if absent - each app or o-s package had a simple config file to specify build options and dependencies (extra './configure' options for o-s packages) - each o-s package had a 'patches' directory to allow published and custom patches to be applied - used a 'staging' directory tree (xx/usr/bin, xx/lib, xx/usr/include ...) to hold header files, static libraries etc. that would be generated during the build and used during the build, but which would not be installed onto the root filesystem. Packages would be 'installed' to the staging dir but only copied to the rootfs if required to be in the image ( bin/ and lib/*.so etc) - finally, generated compressed bootable kernel image for flashing (configurable IP address of NFS export of rootfs) -- ptxdist mailing list [email protected]
