[Buildroot] Reproducing Autobuild errors

Thomas De Schampheleire patrickdepinguin at gmail.com
Mon Oct 21 13:46:32 UTC 2013


Hi Anirudha,

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 3:00 PM, Anirudha Bose <ani07nov at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone.
>
> This is the first time I am posting in this mailing list so I would like to
> introduce myself first. My name is Anirudha Bose, and I am an undergraduate
> student doing my major in Computer Science. I am specifically interested in
> contributing to Buildroot because I have done some similar work using M
> Cross Environment (MXE) during Google Summer of Code 2013.

Welcome! We're looking forward to your contributions...

>
> For a start I am trying to fix some Autobuild errors. For example if I am
> trying to fix this error [1]. Here are the steps I did to reproduce the
> error on my machine.
>
> 1. Downloaded the config file and saved it as .config in my buildroot dir.
> 2. Downloaded the Power PC 603e toolchain from this [2] link.
> 3. I still don't know where to extract and keep this tarball; and what
> should be the path in the .config file. I also do not know what to do with
> the defconfig file. Should I save it as .defconfig in the buildroot dir?
> 4. make

We currently have two sources of autobuild results, one from Peter and
one from Thomas Petazzoni. The autobuild you are referring to is from
Peter (see the file 'submitter' in the autobuild directory). In these,
the toolchain is not configured as a 'toolchain to be downloaded'
(which is the case for Thomas Petazzoni's autobuild results).

In the last case (Thomas Petazzoni), you don't have to download the
tarball manually. In this case, the easiest way (according to me) to
reproduce an autobuild failure is to download the defconfig file, and
start from that. For example:

cd <your-buildroot-repo>
wget http://autobuild.buildroot.org/results/912/91289fc77e7dc7ed6342414df91c35d78d7eabc2/defconfig
make defconfig BR2_DEFCONFIG=defconfig
<make menuconfig, or edit .config: you will need to change BR2_DL_DIR
to point to something local)
make

In the case of Peter's autobuild, the above steps will be the same,
except that you will indeed have to download the toolchain, extract it
to some location, and update the .config file to point to that
location in option BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL_PATH. After that you can hit
'make'.

Assuming that the problem is not related to missing dependencies, you
can get faster results by replacing the 'make' step with 'make
toolchain <failing-package>', for example 'make toolchain trace-cmd'.
This last command will only build the 'toolchain' package (that will
download-if-needed and check the toolchain) and build the trace-cmd
package and its dependencies. It avoids building other packages from
the configuration that are not related.
After the initial 'toolchain' run, you can rebuild trace-cmd from
scratch (for example after making some changes to the .mk file) using
'make trace-cmd-dirclean trace-cmd'


>
> After this I expect to get the same error which I see in the log of
> autobuild. I intend to fix this by compiling the package which failed with
> an extra CFLAG. So, where am I supposed to make this change?

This should probably be added in package/<pkg>/<pkg>.mk
Have a look at the buildroot documentation about 'adding packages' for
more information on this:
http://buildroot.uclibc.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#adding-packages


Note that specifically for trace-cmd, there is already a patch in the queue:
http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/285041/
I'm not sure if it fixes the mentioned autobuild too, so it's best
that you first try without that patch to see if you can reproduce the
problem, then add the patch and see if the problem is gone (after
cleaning as explained above). If this fixes the problem, then you
don't need to do further work, but you can reply on that patch with
'Tested-by: Your name <e-mail>' to indicate that you tested the patch
and it works for you. This helps the maintainer in knowing which
patches are good or not.

Please let us know if we can explain something further.

Best regards,
Thomas



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