OLPC build creation failed

[Martin Langhoff]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 8:51 PM, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:
> Instead, you should fix OOB so it works to cross-compile.

Unfortunately, OOB is just a nice wrapper around anaconda and rpm. You
cannot cross-build because

 - The anaconda toolchain does not have a good separation of
environment arch vs target arch, because you run the installer on the
target machine. This may be fixable with some effort.

 - rpm does not install cross arch because scripts (%pre/%post, etc)
often run binaries within the target fs. This is not fixable, unless
you run the rpm stage in an emulator. If you are going to invite an
emulator to the party, just do it around the whole process.

 - You don't invite an ARM emulator to the party because you want to
complete the build this year. ARM HW is slowish but bearable (build
time is ~1hr).

In practical terms, anyone building an OS image for an XO deployment
has access to an ARM-based XO. That drops the priority of
cross-building consistently.

TBH, I have never seen any OS image builder / composer in the Linux
world that works cross platform.



m
-- 
 martin at laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC
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