Buildroot:DeveloperDaysFOSDEM2016

Buildroot Developers Meeting, 1-2 February 2016, Brussels
Report of the meeting is at https://pad.ouvaton.coop/BRDevelDaysFOSDEM2016

Location and date
The Buildroot community is organizing a meeting on February 1st and 2nd 2016, 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 Google offices, located Chaussée d'Etterbeek 180, 1040 Brussels, very close to the Schuman metro station.

The meeting hours will be 9 AM to 6 PM on both days, the lunch is free of charge, courtesy of Google. On Sunday and Monday evenings, we will be organising some social events for which the details will be communicated to the participants.

Sponsors


We would like to thank our sponsors:
 * 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) Samuel MARTIN, arriving at Bruxelles Midi train station on Friday at 19:47, leaving from Bruxelles Midi train station on Tuesday at 19:13.
 * 2) Thomas Petazzoni, arriving at BRU airport on Friday at 20:05, leaving from BRU airport on Tuesday at 21:05.
 * 3) Yann E. MORIN, arriving at Brussels Midi on Friday, 17:17, and leaving from Brussels Midi on Tuesday, 18:43.
 * 4) Arnout Vandecappelle, commuting daily from Leuven.
 * 5) Thomas De Schampheleire
 * 6) Julien BOIBESSOT, arriving at Brussels Midi on Friday, 15:30, and leaving from Brussels Midi on Tuesday, 16:00.
 * 7) Peter Korsgaard
 * 8) Gwenhael Goavec-Merou
 * 9) Naour Romain
 * 10) Maxime Hadjinlian, arriving at Bruxelles Midi train station on Sunday at 10:47 am, leaving from Bruxelles Midi train station on Tuesday at 19:13
 * 11) Luca Ceresoli, arriving at BRU airport on Friday at 20:20, leaving from BRU airport on Tuesday at 16:30 (not attending the meeting on Tuesday afternoon).

Who can attend ?
This meeting is opened to all Buildroot users and developers. The event is free. However, we make it clear that it is not a training event about Buildroot aimed at newcomers. It is a meeting for Buildroot developers to make progress about various topics in Buildroot. It is recommended to already be a Buildroot contributor to participate to the event.

Topic to discuss

 * key-signing party
 * Buildroot Association
 * GSoC participation
 * Defining possible topics.
 * Initial ideas:
 * Reproducible builds
 * Testing infrastructure
 * State of per-package staging patches
 * Ask Gustavo
 * State of relocatable host tools
 * musl/gettext handling
 * A proposal has been made by Bernd on the mailing list
 * qemu / host-qemu integration
 * run-time testing infrastructure
 * any progress since the last meeting?
 * Licensing of patches: clarifying in the manual and/or the COPYING file the license under which the patches for the different packages are released.
 * How to deal with packages that require specific kernel options to be set.
 * "Big" pending series:
 * legal-info series from Yann to save everything (patches, etc.)
 * toolchain-external tweaks from Thomas DS
 * atomic series from Thomas P.
 * uClibc version selection removal from Thomas P.
 * circular dependency fixes from Yann
 * barebox two-stage series from Pieter Smith
 * Kernel headers same version as kernel from Yann
 * freeswitch package from Bernd (but not sure much discussion is needed)
 * gtk3/wayland bump from Gustavo. Big question is: gtk3 now depends on OpenGL support
 * mysql/galera series from Sylvain Raibaud: do we want a virtual package ?
 * config+menu to menuconfig translation from Yann

Hackaton topics

 * gdb debugging improvements:
 * toolchain copying: lib structure in staging and target should line up; otherwise gdb will not automatically find libraries. For example, for external toolchains where libstdc++ is in /lib, buildroot copies it to /usr/lib and gdb doesn't find it. Workaround is to 'set solib-search-path' in gdb.
 * cross-gdb in output/staging/usr/share/buildroot: this could become a wrapper that immediately passes '-x gdbinit' instead of requiring the user to do that. In fact, this could even remove the need for gdbinit, and make it immediately relocatable because the wrapper script can calculate the correct path instead of hardcode it.
 * For either the internal or the external toolchain, the cross-gdb symlink is missing.
 * Host-perf support after tools infrastructure changes in linux.mk (and the removal of perf.mk) (Yann looks at it)
 * Clean up TODO list on eLinux.org/Buildroot