From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Petazzoni Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2016 22:17:48 +0200 Subject: [Buildroot] Report from the Buildroot Summer Camp Message-ID: <20160706221748.3bd00890@free-electrons.com> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net Hello all, As was announced on the list, six core/regular Buildroot developers met from July 1 to July 5 in Toulouse, France, for the "Buildroot Summer Camp". Peter Korsgaard, Samuel Martin, Yann E. Morin, Romain Naour, Maxime Hadjinlian and myself participated to this event. Thanks to spending 5 days full time on Buildroot, we managed to work on a significant number of topics. First of all, most of our effort was concentrated on reducing the backlog of patches in patchwork. - We started the meeting with about ~250 patches in patchwork. - We ended the meeting with only 98 patches remaining in patchwork, which is the lowest number that has been reached in many years. We hope to continue this effort in the coming weeks, and welcome your help to review and test the patches that remain in the backlog. - We merged a total of 357 patches (from 3d7aa870a162b7b4cbb840f79a56e1f2c0e6d89c to 563c693fdce1363ea6a66af9b8f73987de8b6ff9). - 1402 e-mails have been exchanged on the list during the meeting. Noticeable things that have been merged: - Bump of the SELinux stack. Thanks to Adam Duskett for providing the patches. - Addition of Qemu defconfig for MIPS r6. Thanks to Vicente Olivert Riera for providing the patches. - Many new packages added: python-engineio, python-socketio, python-tomako, openblas, python-xlwt, python-xlutils, libuio, python-scapy3k, babeld, systemd-bootchart, acpitool, libaacs, libbdplus, libvdpau, ninja, supertuxkart, acpica, runc, docker-containerd, jemalloc, texinfo, rs485conf, circus, dante. - Better support for Fortran was added, including support for Fortran in the external toolchains, and the addition of a hidden boolean that tells packages whether Fortran is available or not. Several packages started using it. Thanks to Samuel Martin and Vicente Olivert Riera for working on this topic. - Addition of BR2_REPRODUCIBLE, which will be used progressively to make Buildroot builds byte-to-byte reproducible. Thanks to Gilles Chanteperdrix for starting this effort. - A significant amount of systemd patches have been merged, mainly from Gave Evans. Thanks to Maxime Hadjinlian and Yann E. Morin for their review and additional patches on the topic. - Support for fetching git submodules in packages has been added. Use _GIT_SUBMODULES = YES in your package to enable the fetching of git submodules. Thanks to Yann E. Morin for working on this topic. - The automatic "derivation" of host package dependencies from their corresponding target dependencies has been removed. This was too "obscure" and caused a number of mistakes over time. We thought it was better to make the dependencies of the target and host packages separate and explicit. A large number of patches was needed to achieve this goal. Thanks to Julien Floret for his work on the topic. - The package infrastructure has been changed to not attempt to download when no _VERSION variable is set (instead of defining it to "undefined"). This allowed to clean-up a number of packages for which the source code is in Buildroot, or when there is no source code at all (virtual packages for example). - Support for building the "system emulation" mode in the host-qemu package has been added. Thanks to Simon Maes for providing the initial patches. - The dependencies on BR2_PACKAGE_BUSYBOX_SHOW_OTHERS have been moved from package/Config.in to their respective packages. - libgpg-error was finally bumped (to version 1.23). This was long overdue, but wasn't a simple bump since libgpg-error now has some architecture specific bits, so the architecture dependency had to be propagated to all reverse dependencies. - A number of tweaks have been made on how the options of some packages are displayed. However, the complete series from Yann E. Morin that moved more packages to use "menuconfig" has not been merged. Both Peter and I felt that it was not really improving the usability. - Support for the Blackfin architecture in the internal toolchain has been added. Thanks to Waldemar Brodkorb for working on this topic. - A host-texinfo package has been added, and is now used as a dependency of binutils and gdb when needed. This should hopefully fix the longstanding "makeinfo missing" build failures. - Packages can now register "target finalize hooks" using _TARGET_FINALIZE_HOOKS rather than the global TARGET_FINALIZE_HOOKS variable. This makes sure the package hooks are only called when the package is enabled. - We have added a new option, BR2_ROOTFS_POST_FAKEROOT_SCRIPT, which allows to pass to Buildroot some scripts that will be called *within* the fakeroot environment. It started from a patch provided by Cam Hutchison that proposed to support rootfs overlays passed as tarball, and extracted within the fakeroot environment (so that permissions and owernship are preserved). We replaced Cam's proposal by a more general solution, similar to the post-build and post-image script, but that runs within the fakeroot environment, right before the root filesystem image is produced. Other topics: - We decided to reject the "merged defconfig" proposal from Sam Bobroff, since we believe this should be handled outside of Buildroot (http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2016-June/165384.html). - As mentionned above, we decided to not merge a significant part of Yann E. Morin's proposal to use 'menuconfig' in many more places, though we took some of the patches (http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2016-July/166512.html). - We started discussing the series from Yann E. Morin that splits the skeleton to improve systemd support, and adds support for using a read-only rootfs with systemd. Some of the preparatory patches have been merged. I'll sum up the discussion as a reply to the relevant thread. I think I can say that all of us really enjoyed this Summer Camp, and we look forward to the next Buildroot meeting next to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe. I would like to thank all the participants who joined this Summer Camp and participated. I would also like to thank OpenWide/Smile [1] for sponsoring the participation of Romain Naour to the Summer Camp. Best regards, Thomas [1] http://ingenierie.openwide.fr/ -- Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering http://free-electrons.com