[Aboriginal] new user on the list (with questions)

Bjørn Forsman bjorn.forsman at gmail.com
Thu Apr 7 08:59:29 PDT 2011


Hi Rob,

Thanks for that long (and quick!) reply! Please don't think I'm rude
just because my reply won't be nearly as long :-)

2011/4/7 Rob Landley <rob at landley.net>:
> On 04/07/2011 01:33 AM, Bjørn Forsman wrote:
>> Hi Rob,
[snip]
> I've actually been meaning to take openembedded and buildroot and such
> and treat them as small distros: try to chop off their "what you build"
> and "how you build" bits to convince them to natively build their
> packages on an unknown target.  I.E. treat buildroot like koji or
> catalyst: something that populates a chroot using the host's native
> toolchain.

You mean creating buildroot and OE control-images? (I wasn't expecting
that after the "accidental distro" thing.)

>> * Where is the hg clone URL for Aboriginal Linux?
>
> hg clone http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal

Ah, so it's the same as the webUI! I was so close to trying that :-)

> At the top of my todo list is finishing gentoo-boostrap because A) I've
> already done half the work for that (and 2/3 of the research), B) it
> builds from source already.

What's missing in gentoo-bootstrap? (I haven't tried it yet.)

It's really nice that Gentoo has one package metadata repository for
all ARCHs (they do right?), but having a package manager written in
python feels bloated for embedded systems.

Archlinux is pretty easy to build from source also (see Arch Build
System). But upstream Archlinux doesn't care about other architectures
than x86/x86_64 though, so that's a minus.

> After that probably Debian/Ubuntu, becuase thats what I use on my laptop
> and Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro with somewhere around 40%
> market share.  (And considerably higher among developer workstations.)

Great! I'm glad you're planning more bootstraps.

> By the way, I'm currently stuck on the last gplv2 release of binutils
> and gcc the same way I was stuck on busybox 1.2.2.  (I'm never going to
> contribute to any GPLv3 licensed project unless paid, and I'm not
> comfortable shipping binaries of that stuff.)  Unfortunately that means
> I can't do armv7 and the microblaze targets.

Really? Why is it so bad? Does using a GPLv3 compiler mean the
produced binaries are also under GPLv3?!

> I'm subscribed to the pcc
> mailing list and I check in on llvm/clang from time to time, and I
> really hope one of those unseats gcc.  (That's why I was working on
> tinycc, but Grischka's permanently rendered that project irrelevant.)

It seems pcc doesn't support any ARM targets on linux and clang only
support ARMv6 and ARMv7. (I'm mostly into embedded linux because of
ARM...). I wonder when they get better ARM support.

> Using crosstool-ng would be a great workaround for that.  They do
> toolchains so I don't have to.  And if ALL they do is toolchains: great,
> leverage it.  (But I need cross and native, and I'm picky about 'em, and
> I still need to build my own C library because uClibc ain't fully cooked
> yet, and ccwrap.c is a better approach than trying to get gcc's path
> logic to _EVER_ work...)

Yes, I think crosstool-NG has a clearly defined scope. BTW,
crosstool-NG also do a bit of canadian-cross:
http://ymorin.is-a-geek.org/projects/crosstool#canadian_build
http://ymorin.is-a-geek.org/hg/crosstool-ng/ct-ng.canadian/

>> Thanks for writing Aboriginal Linux, I'm very excited about it :-)
>
> Woot.  Thanks.  Let me know what I can do to help. :)

Thanks. I hope to give you more questions later.

Best regards,
Bjørn Forsman

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