Chapter 14. 18h00 - BOFS: Distbuilder: A System for Building Cross-Compiled Distributions from Source

BOFS: Distbuilder: A System for Building Cross-Compiled Distributions from Source

La Monte HP Yarroll

I was excited to see this BOFS and attended it because I had just discovered distbuilder and had found it easy to work with and it worked well for me. But I was sitting there for the presentation portion wondering why the heck I didn't recognize any of what they were talking about. It was all vaguely like what I had worked with but it also seemed quite different too. "Maybe," I thought to myself, "they're talking about a newer release that I haven't worked with yet."

The confusion was cleared up when I got back home to my development machine and discovered that I had never used distbuilder, it was busybox's buildroot that I had worked with! :-)

Getting back to distbuilder... it appears to be yet another Timesys internal project. It seems to do roughly the same thing as buildroot, although it appears to be a little more involved... seeing as it uses a database.

In the following discussion I picked up two interesting points:

1. Apparently when you make code available due to GPL you must provide that code for up to 3 years. Several people (myself included) had never heard of that clause and questioned the presenter (myself not included) on it. But as it turns out it's true: section 3.b) of version 2 of the GPL states:

   3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following: a) ... b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code...

2. One of the most difficult things that occurs when working with cross-development environments are autofoo configure scripts that call AC_TRY_RUN. If you're using a cross-compiler this will always fail. It would be so much nicer if people who write these scripts would convert these to AC_TRY_BUILD instead and gracefully handle potential failures.