From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Petazzoni Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:04:15 +0200 Subject: [Buildroot] User-enabled host packages? In-Reply-To: <4E79E001.7010409@lucaceresoli.net> References: <4E79E001.7010409@lucaceresoli.net> Message-ID: <20110930160415.69616a8d@skate> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net Hello, In this e-mail, I'll try to summarize what I understand to be the consensus on this issue and also what I, as a Buildroot contributor, consider acceptable for integration : * It is desirable to have *some* host packages visible in the menuconfig interface, but *most* host packages should remain invisible as they are today, when those are solely used as build dependencies. The criteria on deciding whether an host package should be made visible or not depends on whether this host package contains utilities that are directly useful for development. Things like image generators, debugging or flashing utilities that run on the host but interact with a target, etc. are the typical types of host packages that are expected to be visible. * From a .mk file perspective, exposing some host packages requires no change to the existing infrastructure. All host packages must be stored in the package/ subdirectory, just like any other package. So even the omap-u-boot-utils proposed by Luca should be in package/omap-u-boot-utils, just like package/uboot-tools. * From a Config.in perspective, the host packages that need to be visible should implement a package//Config.in.host file describing the configuration options. Those configuration options should have the BR2_HOST_PACKAGE_* prefix. All these Config.in.host files are included in a single "Packages -> Host utitities" submenu, from package/Config.in. There is no need to create subsections in this menu at the moment, since the number of utilities shown here is suspected to remain limited. * The package infrastructure is modified so that when a BR2_HOST_PACKAGE_ option is enabled, then host-foo is added to the global TARGETS variable. What do others think of this proposal? Peter, what is your feeling about the general idea and this proposal? Can we go ahead and implement something like proposed in this e-mail? Regards, Thomas -- Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons Kernel, drivers, real-time and embedded Linux development, consulting, training and support. http://free-electrons.com