[Buildroot] [RFC] [PATCH 0/5] Buildroot cleanup

Will Newton will.newton at gmail.com
Tue Sep 8 17:03:58 UTC 2009


On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 11:09 PM, Thomas
Petazzoni<thomas.petazzoni at free-electrons.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I would like to propose a few patches to start a cleanup of
> Buildroot. My goal is not only to cleanup Buildroot internally, but
> also to clean it up so that it is easier to understand for our users.
>
> This thread is meant to be a preliminary discussion only and is not
> yet a request for inclusion, because :
>
>  * Some of the proposed changes remove features that I think confuse
>   our users and are not central in Buildroot operation, but others
>   might have different opinion on the matter ;
>
>  * The changes are relatively invasive and I did only limited testing
>   on them.
>
>  * The documentation is not updated with the changes. I'm waiting for
>   the community opinion on the changes before spending time to update
>   the documentation
>
> While the commit logs gives all the details, I would like to give an
> quick overview of the proposed changes :
>
>  1. Remove the "project" feature.
>
>    This feature is meant to allow an user to build a Linux system for
>    several similar platforms where the differences are only in
>    Busybox, kernel and U-Boot configuration. While this feature might
>    be useful in some very specific cases, my opinion is that it adds
>    far too much complexity in Buildroot compared to the added-value
>    it gives.
>
>    Removing this feature allows to instantly make the directory
>    layout a lot simpler to understand for a newcomer (no strane
>    project_build_ARCH directory anymore !)

I think this is probably the right thing to do, the project support
has never made much sense to me.

>  2. Remove the BOARD/LOCAL feature.
>
>    This mechanism is a duplication of something that could already be
>    done in a different way: by adding a new target in target/device/.

I didn't know this existed.

>  3. By default, put the output directories in a single directory,
>    named output/.
>
>    Nothing complex, it just clarifies the tree for a new user.
>
>  4. Remove BR2_TOPDIR_PREFIX and BR2_TOPDIR_SUFFIX
>
>    The same thing can be done with O=

I didn't know this existed either!

>  5. Rename the output directories with more sensible names.
>
>    In the output directory, we now have
>
>     - build/    where all the packages are built
>     - images/   where the final kernel and rootfs images are stored
>     - staging/  the staging directory (containing the development files
>                 and libraries compiled for the target)
>     - target/   which contains the target root filesystem
>     - host/     which contains all the host programs
>     - stamps/   which contains the stamps files
>
> Thanks for your input,

One thing I want to do quite often is to keep my toolchain but rebuild
my target fs from scratch, so:

# rm -rf build_i686 project_build_i686
# make

It looks like this might be a little bit more complex now. It would be
good to get some makefile targets that can do this, it's possible they
already exist but I'm just not aware of them.


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