Buildroot:DeveloperDaysELCE2013

Buildroot Developers Meeting, 26-27 October 2013, Edinburgh, UK
Event sponsored by Imagination Technologies.

What is Buildroot ?
Buildroot is a set of Makefiles and patches that makes it easy to generate a complete embedded Linux system. Buildroot can generate any or all of a cross-compilation toolchain, a root filesystem, a kernel image and a bootloader image. Buildroot is useful mainly for people working with small or embedded systems, using various CPU architectures (x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, etc.) : it automates the building process of your embedded system and eases the cross-compilation process.

Location and date
The Buildroot community is organizing a meeting on Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th October 2013 in Edinburgh, for Buildroot developers and contributors. This meeting will be a mixture of discussion and hacking session around the Buildroot project. This meeting takes place right after the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, in order to make it easy for participants to attend both events.

Note that it is not mandatory to attend both days. It is expected that the first day will be mostly dedicated to discussion, while the second day will be mostly dedicated to hacking.

The meeting will take place at the Edinburgh Training and Conference Venue (http://www.edintrain.com/), 16 St. Mary's Street, Edinburgh. See http://www.edintrain.com/location-and-accesibility/ for details on the location. The meeting room is kindly sponsored by Imagination Technologies.

The meeting will take place from 9:30 AM to 6 PM on both days, and a dinner will be planned on Saturday evening. The dinner will be paid by our sponsor Imagination Technologies, but the lunches will be paid by the participants themselves.

Sponsor: Imagination Technologies
Imagination Technologies has kindly offered to sponsor the Buildroot Developers Meeting. They are offering to the Buildroot community the meeting room (with Internet connection, projector, and everything needed to let a team of open-source developers work efficiently) and the Saturday evening dinner.

Imagination Technologies is a global leader in multimedia, processor and communication technologies. The company creates and licenses market-leading IP solutions for graphics, video and vision, CPU/general purpose processing, multi-standard communications and connectivity, and cross-platform voice and video communications. Imagination's MIPS CPU cores and architectures range from solutions for ultra low-power 32-bit microcontrollers to high-performance 32/64-bit advanced applications and network processing. MIPS is supported by a broad ecosystem of tools and software including open source embedded Linux distributions like Buildroot.

Participants

 * 1) Thomas Petazzoni, confirmed. Will be in Edinburgh starting from Tuesday 22nd of October. Leaving on Monday 28th early in the morning.
 * 2) Yann E. MORIN, confirmed. Will be in Edimburgh starting Sunday, October the 20th, late afternoon, till Monday, October the 28th, early (very early) in the morning.
 * 3) Peter Korsgaard, confirmed. Will be in Edinburgh starting from Monday 21st of October. Leaving Sunday 27th in the afternoon.
 * 4) Markos Chandras, confirmed.
 * 5) Samuel Martin, confirmed. Will be in Edinburgh starting from Wednesday 23rd of October. Leaving Sunday 27th in the afternoon.
 * 6) Arnout Vandecappelle, confirmed. Will be in Edinburgh starting Sunday, October 20th, late evening, till Sunday, October 28th in the afternoon.

Registration
Please contact Thomas Petazzoni (thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com) if you would like to attend.

Attending the event is free, but registration is required.

Note that the event is mainly intended for Buildroot developers and contributors, or advanced users willing to contribute more or to share about their use case for Buildroot.

List of topics to discuss
This list is open to contribution. Even if you do not plan into attending the event, but you think of interesting topics, feel free to edit and update this list.

Good starting points are:
 * Previous DevDay topics
 * Last report

Topics for discussion (Saturday)

 * BR2_EXTERNAL
 * state of Thomas' patchset
 * shortcomings with in-tree build vs. out-of-tree (since there's no Makefile wrapper for in-tree builds, we can't store BR2_EXTERNAL)
 * Major patch sets remaining to merge
 * The Config.in.legacy problem for strings (proposed by ThomasDS)
 * The eudev/systemd patch set (proposed by Eric Le Bihan)
 * The drm/mesa bump (proposed by Spenser Gilliland)
 * The SELinux related packages (proposed by Rockwell Collins)
 * The top-level parallel build (proposed by Fabio Porcedda)
 * Yann would like to present his buildroot.config project: goals, status, future
 * Google Summer Of Code
 * Wrap up of the 2013 edition
 * 2014 edition organization application is in February/March. For sure we'll talk about this on the BDD in February, but it may be a good idea to brainstorm about topics already now.
 * Community organization
 * We still have a scalability problem on Peter's side. Many patches take too much time before they are applied. Some options:
 * Give more people commit power.
 * Semi-automatically accept patches with N acks from a predefined list of reviewers. This probably needs a real definition of the meaning of an ack.
 * Semi-automatically apply patches, build, and post results on the list. (especially useful for patches that indicate that they fix an autobuild problem. In this case the same autobuild could be restarted with patch)
 * Create a checkpatch script.
 * Mailing list traffic has increased a lot. Should we provide a separate support channel for users?
 * Instrumentation of build steps.
 * Internal toolchain backend status and future (following ct-ng backend removal)
 * Patchwork cleanup: the first 'week' of the 10 oldest patches has passed a while ago. Some patches were renewed, others not and should be closed. Should we continue with this, and if so at which pace? I (ThomasDS) think we should definitely continue, but maybe at a 2-week rather than 1-week pace because I found it very hard to have a good look at this topic in just one week.

Topics to hack on (Sunday)

 * help triage the pending patches
 * look at some autobuild problems
 * instrumentation of build steps
 * update TODO list at Buildroot (some items have already been handled)