Buildroot:DeveloperDaysFOSDEM2015

Buildroot Developers Meeting, 2-3 February 2015, Brussels
The report of the meeting is written at

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.
 * Mind is the Embedded Software division of Essensium, which provides consultancy and services specifically in the field of Linux and Open Source SW for Embedded Systems. Mind is currently hiring! Mind will be offering the Monday dinner to the participants of the meeting.

Participants

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

Participating remotely
If you are not able to attend but want nonetheless to attend the meeting, it will be possible using Google Hangout. Please send your Google address to thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com if you are interested.

Topics to discuss

 * Download infra
 * Patches that need discussion
 * Per-package help text (Thomas P.)
 * The mesa3d-headers issue (Yann)
 * DT Overlay patches for dtc (Peter Seiderer)
 * Lua 5.3 stuff (François Perrad)
 * Simple network config (Jérémy Rosen)
 * skeleton: make /run a proper directory/filesystem
 * 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...
 * Upstream tarballs not named PKG-VERSION
 * Yann proposed a way to specify upstream name when it differs from PKG-VERSION, and keep _SOURCE to name the local tarball
 * Alternate solution: always use PKG-VERSION when saving the local tarball anyway
 * 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)
 * Google Summer of Code
 * Money from the GSoC 2014
 * 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?
 * GSoC 2015
 * Org registration opens 2015-02-09 19:00 UTC, closes 2015-02-20 19:00 UTC
 * Should we participate again this year?
 * What topics?
 * Open patches
 * autobuild-run improvements (ThomasDS)

Code hacking

 * Continuation of the kconfig-package infrastructure (for Linux etc.)