[Buildroot] Project configuration management

Mateusz Słupny mateusz.slupny at vestiacom.com
Tue Apr 5 11:14:28 UTC 2016


We'll go with merge_config.sh script as it's already a part of buildroot and we should be able to integrate it easily.

Thank you very much for all the suggestions!

best regards,
-- 
Mateusz Slupny, lead developer, Vestiacom
E-mail: mateusz.slupny at vestiacom.com

> On 04 Apr 2016, at 22:45, Arnout Vandecappelle <arnout at mind.be> wrote:
> 
> On 04/04/16 20:44, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
>> Hello Mateusz,
>> 
>> On Mon, 4 Apr 2016 15:55:44 +0200, Mateusz Słupny wrote:
>> 
>>> We are using buildroot for building a series of projects. What I feel
>>> is missing in buildroot is a way to store different configurations in
>>> scope of a single project. For example, we would like to prepare
>>> three types of builds, let's name them "Release", that is the basic
>>> build, "Develop", that is a Release build + dropbear + some other
>>> utilities, and "Extra", that contains all configuration options from
>>> Develop + some additional tools (gdb, valgrind, etc.). To achieve
>>> that, we have to maintain total of (number of projects) x (number of
>>> build types) different configuration files that are almost identical.
>>> 
>>> Can this goal be achieved without using multiple defconfig files that
>>> share approx 90% of their contents? What would you advise to avoid
>>> that?
>>> 
>>> First solution that comes to my mind is to allow nesting defconfig
>>> files with some include/source statement, but AFAICS that's not
>>> supported.
>>> 
>>> Please note that we are aware of "layered customizations" concept,
>>> and we're using it to some degree, but it doesn't solve all the
>>> issues, e.g. setting toolchain, selecting packages, and setting
>>> multiple paths to layers itself has to be done in defconfig files
>>> anyway.
>> 
>> The mechanism we typically advise in such situation is to use defconfig
>> fragments, and assemble them as needed to create the configuration you
>> feed into Buildroot. A shell script (or other) can help generating the
>> configuration fed into Buildroot from the fragments.
> 
> And that shell script exists already: support/kconfig/merge_config.sh
> 
> The main difficulty with this model is that there is no simple way to split configs. Fortunately, for buildroot this is typically not much of a problem, because your fragments will just add some packages.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Arnout
> 
> 
>> 
>> I'm Cc'ing Gustavo, who has been using this model for quite some time
>> for a large project that involves multiple HW platforms, I'm sure he
>> can give more insights on how to achieve that.
>> 
>> Best regards,
>> 
>> Thomas
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Arnout Vandecappelle                          arnout at mind be
> Senior Embedded Software Architect            +32-16-286500
> Essensium/Mind                                http://www.mind.be
> G.Geenslaan 9, 3001 Leuven, Belgium           BE 872 984 063 RPR Leuven
> LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/arnoutvandecappelle
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