Debian has historically been packaged with desktop systems and native building in mind. It is increasingly being used in low-resource and embedded systems. Building natively on such systems is extremely slow and sometimes almost impossible, so cross-compiling is very important, and the normal way of building.
There is a number of things in packaging which affect how embedded-friendly they are. Here we explain some of the things you should do to make sure that your packages are suitable for embedded use. If you have questions please use the debian-embedded mailing list.
Background
Below are various examples of things you should do/avoid doing, but it is best if you understand why these things are done. Here is some explanation of the issues.
Terminology (build/host/target).
- build/target machines
- build-time/install-time/run-time deps
- build-arch deps/ target-arch deps
- minimal base system - 50MB not 2GB
- busybox-friendly scripts
splitting out docs, optional tools, examples, languages (see emlocale to generate control data to package each language separately.)
- install scripts - install-time (on build machine), run-time (on target machine)
Things to mention:
- reducing build-dependecies
- - just removing unneeded stuff (sometimes pkgs have Build-Deps
- which are not really needed)
- move documentation and other architecture-independent stuff to arch:all packages
- - just removing unneeded stuff (sometimes pkgs have Build-Deps
Options needed for packaging:
- DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nodocs (flag for not building docs) DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck (for skipping tests)
Emdebian Packages
TODO list states: "Select list of Debian packages to form Emdebian"
Check EmdebianRootfs