Buildroot:DeveloperDaysELCE2013

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 exact location in Edinburgh remains to be defined. We are interested by ideas of places that would be appropriate (for examples local companies that would be ready to provide a meeting room for the WE).

The meeting will take place from 9:30 AM to 6 PM on both days, and a dinner will be planned on Saturday evening. Note that unless sponsors are found, participants will have to pay for their own expenses (food, drinks, etc.).

Sponsoring
If you're a company interested in supporting the Buildroot project, you might want to consider sponsoring this event. We are interested in having sponsors for the meeting room and/or dinner/food for the participants. Please contact Thomas Petazzoni (thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com) if you're interested.

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, November the 20th, late afternoon, till Monday, November 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)

Topics to hack on (Sunday)

 * help triage the pending patches