Buildroot:DeveloperDaysFOSDEM2015

Location and date
The Buildroot community is organizing a meeting on February 2nd and 3rd 2015, for Buildroot developers and contributors. This meeting will be a mixture of discussion and hacking session around the Buildroot project. This meeting takes place either right before or right after the FOSDEM, in order to make it easy for participants to attend both events. It is not mandatory to attend both days.

The meeting will take place in offices of Google in Brussels, located Chaussée d'Etterbeek 176-180. See a map.

Sponsors


We would like to thank our sponsor:
 * Google is sponsoring due to their usage of Buildroot to build embedded Linux systems for embedded devices used in the Google Fiber project. The source code of their modified Buildroot is available at . Google will be providing the meeting location, with Internet connection, but also free lunch and refreshments for the meeting participants.

We are still looking for a sponsor willing to sponsor the dinner for the participants. Sponsors are offered a visibility on the Buildroot website, during the Buildroot Meeting, and thanks in the Buildroot release e-mail. Please contact Thomas Petazzoni, thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com for more details.

Participants

 * 1) Thomas Petazzoni
 * 2) Yann E. MORIN
 * 3) Peter Korsgaard
 * 4) Samuel MARTIN
 * 5) Maxime Hadjinlian
 * 6) Thomas De Schampheleire
 * 7) Romain Naour
 * 8) Julien Boibessot (Armadeus)

Topics to discuss

 * GitHub helper:
 * try to avoid the breakage when GitHub changes the download scheme
 * use the API => stable, but rate-limited to 60 anonymous requests per hour (5000 when authenticated)
 * always do a git clone => stable, not rate limited, but may have a huge impact on download sizes
 * what to do about other forges: Gitorious, Google Code...
 * The Code Sourcery Standard toolchains:
 * toolchain-external: Detect empty or invalid sysroot
 * toolchain-helpers: factorise the arch sysroot symlink creation
 * toolchain-external: calculation of the symlink to the arch sysroot
 * Further cleanup wrt. static vs. shared:
 * a lot of packages still install static libs, even when doing a shared-only build
 * we can't really run: find staging/ -type f -name '*.a' -delete because of static libs from the toolchain we really want to keep, and because some packages may really want to install only static libs
 * proposal (YEM):
 * add a new package variable: FOO_KEEP_STATIC_LIBS = foo.a foobar.a
 * add a new internal variable: KEEP_STATIC_LIBS += $($(2)_KEEP_STATIC_LIBS)
 * after staging-install, run: find staging/ \( -type f -o -type L \) -name '*.a' -a \! \( -name toolchain.a BLABLA \) -delete
 * where toolchain.a is for all static libs from the toolchain
 * BLABLA is something like: $(foreach lib,$(KEEP_STATIC_LIBS),-o -name $(lib))
 * the reasoning is:
 * there are very few packages that really want to install static libs
 * so instead of saying what to remove (the majority), we state what to keep (the minority)
 * Money from the GSoC
 * Google has paid $500 (€423.94) for mentoring a student
 * Yann has received the money, and holds it on his own bank account for now. What about the long term?
 * How should we spend this money?