[Buildroot] Custom packages: downloading non-tarball packages

[Jonathan Bowman]

Thank you, Thomas, for your gracious and clear response, and the
invitation to contribute patches.

I will look at the items you mentioned and see if I have both the time
and expertise to attend to them.

Regards,
Jonathan

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 6:21 AM, Thomas Petazzoni
<thomas.petazzoni at free-electrons.com> wrote:
> Hello Jonathan,
>
> On Mon, 17 May 2010 21:42:30 -0400
> Jonathan Bowman <bowmanjd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I am new to buildroot, but thanks to an elegant interface and clear
>> documentation, it is serving my needs quite nicely.
>
> Thank you :)
>
>> However, I do have a question regarding best practices. I note that in
>> the documentation it is not recommended to use the "manual" method in
>> the makefiles of new packages.
>
> Yes, correct.
>
>> However, I do not see in the other methods how to deal with sources
>> that are not tarballs. Some code (strangely) only comes in zip files,
>> while other code I would prefer to download using svn, git, or
>> another system.
>>
>> Is there a recommended practice for these scenarios?
>
> It is true that today both package infrastructure (generic and
> autotools) assume that the package is retrieved as a tarball from a
> http or ftp server. These infrastructures could of course be extended
> to handle svn, git or even zip files.
>
> .zip files should be handled automatically just as we handle .tar.gz
> and .tar.bz2 today. This would require some modifications in
> package/Makefile.package.in in the $(BUILD_DIR)/%/.stamp_extracted
> target.
>
> For git/svn, we could probably act differently in the download stage if
> the URL starts with git:// or svn://. But we need to define what the
> semantic of <pkg>_VERSION, <pkg>_SOURCE, <pkg>_SITE will be, how this
> should interact with the directory that caches downloads and how build
> directories should be named.
>
> Don't hesitate to make proposals, either in the form of patches or in
> the form of small design documents.
>
> Thomas
> --
> Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons
> Kernel, drivers, real-time and embedded Linux
> development, consulting, training and support.
> http://free-electrons.com
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