On 12/27/09 07:27, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
Hi Rob -
Again this is buildroot thinking. The distro provides both the native
and cross toolchains for you. You're going to want to use the same
distro as you normally use on your box so the cross toolchain installs
as a package there.
Because boards that use things like uClibc and busybox just aren't interesting
to you?
I used them both before, but I can say with confidence if the platform
will take glibc and bash, most people will expect more complete, in that
sense, more reliable, performance from those.
It breaks down at stock distro init because it's painfully slow. But
otherwise there are real advantages in having the full-strength versions
of everything.
Please don't confuse "development environment" with "build environment". A
Since I didn't use either term, I don't know why you think I'm confusing
them.
development environment has xterms and IDEs and visual diff tools and a web
browser and PDF viewer and so on. A build environment just compiles stuff to
produce executables. (Even on x86, your fire breathing SMP build server in the
back room isn't necessarily something you're going to VNC into and boot a
desktop on.)
As I said in the other reply, my workflow is to edit a package's source
tree on a host (so you can use any editor on your host not just kate /
fish:// ) and by host script with scp and ssh get the current tree
package-built and installed on the device in one step.
So I hope it's clear there is solid separation between what you're
calling "development environment" and "build environment" to the point
they have nothing to do with each other except ssh-based script to get
stuff built.
I agree it's nice to have a build environment compatible with your deployment
environment, and distros certainly have their advantages, but you may not want
to actually _deploy_ 48 megabytes of /var/lib/apt from Ubuntu in an embedded
device.
I did say in the thread you want ARM11+ basis and you need 100-200MBytes
rootfs space to get the advantages of the distro basis. If you have
something weaker (even ARM9 since stock Fedora is ARMv5+ instruction set
by default) then you have to do things the old way and recook everything
yourself one way or another.
Even now there are plenty of suitable platforms that will work with it,
and over time they will only increase. Nothing seems to totally die out
(8051-based micros are still in the market) but each time something new
comes in at the top it grabs some of the market and the older ones shrink.
It boils down to the point that if you just treat the ARM11+ platforms
like the previous generation and stick fat bootloaders and buildroot
blobs on them, you are going to miss out on an epochal simplification
where embedded Linux largely becomes like desktop Linux in workflow,
quality and reliability of update mechanisms, and effort needed to bring
up a box / device.
-Andy
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