Mike, On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 03:28:05PM +0000, MikeW wrote: > /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.
Go ahead. > IMHO a Wiki is one of the best ways of getting 'howto's documented from a user > community. And one of the best ways to confuse documentation in a way nobody ever finds it again :) > 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. Do you know details about their administration and backup strategy? Is it possible to get plain ascii desaster recoverable revision control sets, do they make off-site backups, can we access the backup, can we play the backups back in case of a crash, do you have access to their administrative people? > 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 !! Well, I don't know your proprietary system, so I cannot compare. > - built user apps, libraries, drivers; kernel packages; open-source packages > (including buildroot) PTXdist is heavily inspired on the idea of buildroot, just that it didn't have a menuconfig frontend when I started and PTXdist has developed into a more generic build tool. > - 'user' sources were local files in project tree, packages retrieved from > server tarball directory if absent You can do local packages, and archives are downloaded from the original servers as well. > - 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 packet has a simple packet makefile (rules/foobar.make) and a corresponding Kconfig file (rules/foobar.in). It can be global (in PTXdist) and local (in your project). > - each o-s package had a 'patches' directory to allow published and custom > patches to be applied The structure may be a little bit different - we have $ptxdist/patches/foobar/generic/*.diff, which is auto applied. Note that we for example have support for quilt like series files. > - 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) $(PTXCONF_PREFIX), which is usually $(PTXDIST_WORKSPACE)/local. > - finally, generated compressed bootable kernel image for flashing > (configurable > IP address of NFS export of rootfs) We can generate jffs images, kernels and everything else you might want. Just try it out. Robert -- Dipl.-Ing. Robert Schwebel | http://www.pengutronix.de Pengutronix - Linux Solutions for Science and Industry Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Hildesheim, HRA 2686 Hannoversche Str. 2, 31134 Hildesheim, Germany Phone: +49-5121-206917-0 | Fax: +49-5121-206917-9 -- ptxdist mailing list [email protected]
