On Saturday 12 August 2006 22:38, Yuri Vasilevski wrote:
> Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > so i was tooling along the road thinking about what it would take for
> > people to sit down and use Gentoo/embedded for the target ...
> > currently we have misc ways of doing this by hand (install
> > mask/etc...), but it tends to be error prone and it requires the end
> > user to know more than they should about the portage environment
> >
> > what would help here is a frontend ... something like uClinux or Open
> > Embedded where a menu system allows the user to select the packages
> > to install into the target image and when they're done, they simply
> > type 'make' ... wait a bit and they're left with images that they can
> > take and flash onto the target board
>
> The way I see this, is that this is covered by buildroot, so it would be
> duplicating things at some level to do this with gentoo.

yes, we'd be replacing everything buildroot does that Gentoo doesnt already 
do ... buildroot is really:
 - cross-compiler selection / build
 - package selection / build
 - image generation

now, we already have the first part with crossdev ... the second part we 
mostly have, just need a more user friendly interface

image generation isnt that big of a deal ... that's like running 
`mkfs.<whatever>` on a directory

> > so really, a friendly frontend for the user to select the
> > characteristics of the system, and then a backend to take that config
> > and use emerge to build everything and generate an image ... would
> > make it easy to create stock board descriptions too ...
>
> But I think it would be really nice if we could teach catalyst to
> generate embedded images from some "board" spec files.
> And once this works, a fancy spec file editor with a nice gui could be
> written if needed.

we could take that route of teaching catalyst how to do cross-compiling rather 
than reinventing the wheel
-mike