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Comment: make open embedded link usable
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This project has quite wide scope for the applicant as there are numerous area of work on which they could concentrate. Emdebian currently has working cross-toolchains and build tools to implement our build, patch and naming mechanisms. It also has a few emdebianised target packages. However all of these areas need work, especially the target packages. | This project has quite wide scope for the applicant as there are several area of work on which they could concentrate. Emdebian currently has working cross-toolchains and build tools to implement our build, patch and naming mechanisms. It also has a few emdebianised target packages. However all of these areas need work, especially the target packages. |
Proposal title
Mentor: Wookey
Summary: To get emdebian to the point when it builds useful root filesystems
Required skills:
- 'A bit of everything'
- Understanding of Debian packaging, build systems, repositories
- Cross-building
- Knowledge of small system constraints
- Perl or other scripting language (existing tools are perl or shell)
- Sysadmin
- Ability to get patches accepted upstream
Description:
This project has quite wide scope for the applicant as there are several area of work on which they could concentrate. Emdebian currently has working cross-toolchains and build tools to implement our build, patch and naming mechanisms. It also has a few emdebianised target packages. However all of these areas need work, especially the target packages.
Things that need doing are:
- Emdebianising more packages so that they
- do not install unnecessary things (docs, examples, multiple translations)
- cross-build correctly
- split packages where the default has too many dependencies
- Work on Emdebian policy and actual packages to:
- Speed up boot time
- Reduce dependencies
- Differentiate between install time and run-time dependencies
- Differentiate between build and target build-dependencies
- Shrink minimum rootfs sizes
- Busybox-based rootfs as well as GNU-based
- Dash instead of bash
- Remove perl from essential
- Work on Debian and emdebian tools to:
- Support changes due to above policy
- Make it easy to build and cross-build emdebian packages and support local patches
- Push changes back into Debian as much as possible (e.g faster boot)
- Infrastructure Work:
- Completing auto-build mechansism that will keep emdebian cross-toolchains uptodate with debian toolchain versions
- Incorporate full 3-stage bootstrap changes from slind
- Auto-build emdebian packages, tracking debian versions and including support for developers to track packages which have build failures
- Document:
- Making Emdebian systems
- Emdebianising new packages
- The infrastructure
- Developed Policy
As you can see there is plenty to do, covering a wide range of expertise - buildd setup, policy development, pushing far-reaching tool-changes upstream, fighting autoconf and documentation. Applicants could (and probably should) choose to work on a selection of these tasks that interest them and make a manageable lump of work. The existing developers and the project mentor will help define a suitable subset, but the project does demand significant 'self-starting' on the part of the applicant.
Many of the fixes we need can already be found in [http://www.openembedded.org/ ?OpenEmbedded], Slind, Maemo and previous emdebian developments.
Debian is in a position to improve cross-building in the same way that it has improved architecture support over the last few years. All packages should cross-build, but many do not for various reasons. Work fixing these is valuable to many people. Implementing a set-up to cross-build debian packages and report bugs on those that fail to build using dpkg-cross and emdebian tools would be excellent. However cross-building is not a necessary part of emdebian; it can be natively built too.