From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Petazzoni Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2014 13:26:38 +0800 Subject: [Buildroot] [PATCH] manual/faq: add section about why no binary packages In-Reply-To: <20140106051625.GD7812@tarshish> References: <1388954663-5692-1-git-send-email-yann.morin.1998@free.fr> <1388954663-5692-2-git-send-email-yann.morin.1998@free.fr> <20140106051625.GD7812@tarshish> Message-ID: <20140106132638.39cd986c@skate> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net Dear Baruch Siach, On Mon, 6 Jan 2014 07:16:25 +0200, Baruch Siach wrote: > Thanks for working on this. I think it is also worth mentioning the rationale. > By doing source only we avoid the complexity of handling installation time > dependency tracking and resolution. We also don't need to track what files > each package installs. This makes Buildroot simpler and easier to work with. I would go even further, and explain why tracking what files each package installs is by far not sufficient to support binary packages. Several people have showed up throughout the project history, willing to add support binary packages by assuming that simply tracking which files "make install" installs will be sufficient. But that's forgetting all the optional dependencies problems, and various other things. We had a write-up about this in some report of a past Buildroot Developers Meeting, with some good arguments. Would be nice to dig that up and summarize these arguments in the doc. Best regards, Thomas -- Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering http://free-electrons.com