[Buildroot] User-enabled host packages?
Thomas Petazzoni
thomas.petazzoni at free-electrons.com
Fri Sep 30 14:04:15 UTC 2011
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/<foo>/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_<foo> 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
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