[Buildroot] Package infrastructure for Go programs

Arnout Vandecappelle arnout at mind.be
Wed Oct 4 20:00:08 UTC 2017


 Hi Angelo,

On 28-09-17 12:14, Angelo Compagnucci wrote:
> Hello guys,
> 
> I was reading a thread [1] about a packaging infrastructure for Go
> software and I'm interested to revive it.
> 
> The most difficult objection to overcome is the fact that we should
> decompose software dependencies in the correspondent packages to be
> downloadable separately, but unfortunately with go software (or in
> general with any other software with fluid dependencies and package
> management) this is really not possible.

 Indeed, this is a recurring problem with languages that provide their own
packaging infrastructure. Currently, the rule is indeed that every package needs
to be packaged separately. For npm we have a kind of escape route, that allows
you to give a list of npm packages to install and Buildroot will use npm to
install those (plus dependencies). But that approach doesn't apply for a
Buildroot package that has npm dependencies, only for something the end user
wants to use.

 My personal opinion is that we should let go of the rule that every package
needs to be packaged separately and instead use the language packaging
infrastructure as much as possible. *How* exactly this can be done, I'm not sure
of. But I want to keep the following features (in decreasing order of priority).

1. The build is reproducible. If I build the same .config a year from now, I
should use exactly the same source (and normally end up with exactly the same
result, barring some timestamps etc.).

2. "make source" downloads everything so after that you can do an offline build.

3. Everything appears only once in the target, only a single version is used for
each package, unless the versions are incompatible (e.g. a gstreamer-0.10 and
gstreamer-1 side by side is acceptable).

4. BR2_PRIMARY_SITE works, it should be possible to do an offline build with an
empty download dir as long as you can access BR2_PRIMARY_SITE.

5. Something like our hashes is implemented, i.e. if the upstream archive is
changed, the build breaks.

6. legal-info works, the licenses end up in our manifest and preferably also a
license file.

7. BR2_SECONDARY_SITE works, so if the original archive disappears we can still
do a build.


 1 and 2 are for me essential. The rest is is negotiable :-). Note that the npm
hack currently doesn't even satisfy point 1. I'm absolutely NOT in favour of
repeating that exercise for other languages...


> Go permits to define dependencies on the form of a git repository
> somewhere and this could change from a release to another. Moreover
> the git repository linked by a software could have nested dependencies
> that will be downloaded automatically by the go build system
> recursively.

 And is reproducibility guaranteed, or are these dependencies going to change
automagically (without changing the root version)? I.e., will 1 be satisfied?

> Dependencies are btw private to the software, downloaded in a nested
> folder (usually called "vendor") and cannot be shared easily with
> other software.

 So this will violate 3. But that's actually no problem, because Go always does
static linking so 3 will always be violated in practice (every executable
contains all its dependencies).


> This is generally true with each software that uses a package
> management infrastructure. I can't think of packaging any modern php
> software in buildroot cause the intricacies of dependency management
> added by composer. Using composer in php offers no easy way to share a
> dependency with another php project btw.
> 
> Indeed, some buildroot software written in Go (like flannel) already
> escapes [2] this rule.
> 
> So in the end, it's feasible for software with an internal package
> management and download mechanism to be in buildroot or should we
> leave them out and so the package infrastructure?

 So, above were my preferences. We should probably reserve some time at the next
BR meeting (just two and a half weeks from now) to discuss this face to face.

 Angelo, could you give some thoughts about which of these requirements might
possibly be satisfiable and which ones we will have to sacrifice?

 Regards,
 Arnout

> 
> Thanks for your insights!
> 
> 
> Sincerely, Angelo
> 
> 
> [1] http://buildroot-busybox.2317881.n4.nabble.com/PATCH-0-8-RFC-Adding-a-Go-package-infrastructure-td124596.html
> 
> [2] From the build log for flannel:
> github.com/coreos/flannel/Godeps/_workspace/src/golang.org/x/net/context
> github.com/coreos/flannel/Godeps/_workspace/src/github.com/coreos/go-iptables/iptables
> github.com/coreos/flannel/Godeps/_workspace/src/github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/aws/awserr
> github.com/coreos/flannel/Godeps/_workspace/src/github.com/vaughan0/go-ini
> github.com/coreos/flannel/Godeps/_workspace/src/github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/internal/endpoints
> github.com/coreos/flannel/Godeps/_workspace/src/github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/aws/awsutil
> github.com/coreos/flannel/Godeps/_workspace/src/github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/internal/protocol/query/queryutil
> github.com/coreos/flannel/Godeps/_workspace/src/github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/internal/protocol/xml/xmlutil
> [...]
> In this case flannel doesn't download anything only because the
> dependencies are pre-downloaded and included in the release archive,
> but this still conflict with the buildroot policies.
> 

-- 
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
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