[Buildroot] [PATCH 3/5] manual: update beyond Buildroot section

[Samuel Martin]

Hi Willy, Thomas, all,

2013/8/7 Willy Lambert <lambert.willy at gmail.com>:
>
>
>
> 2013/8/7 Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni at free-electrons.com>
>>
>> Dear Samuel Martin,
>>
>> On Tue,  6 Aug 2013 23:36:22 +0200, Samuel Martin wrote:
>> > From: "A.R.D" <contact at team-ard.com>
>> >
>> > Add details about how to boot images generated by Buildroot
>> > (in VM, over network (NFS/PXE/...).
>> >
>> > Signed-off-by: A.R.D. <contact at team-ard.com>
>> > Signed-off-by: Samuel Martin <s.martin49 at gmail.com>
>>
>> I must say I don't quite like this patch. It's terribly x86-specific,
I agree.

>
>
> obviously it is because I doesn't know anything else ;p. Feel free to give
> the transverse view to transform this into an arch independent section.
>
>
> I've written this because I did have hard time to do something with what I
> generated from BR with my board. The problem is that there is no clue at all
> in the documentation to help people managing this part. I know that this is
> not the Job of BR, but as BR aims at being integrated in specific embedded
> dev processes, you have to give clues on how you do this. Maybe this could
> be outside BR documentation in things like tutorials or getting started or
> even simply links to other wiki/website/tuto that explain all that.
>
> My aim in doing this was :
> _ prevent other people in my case to spend too much time in this part
> _ start something that experts on the subject could detail.
>
> As the aim of BR is to create something to put on a target, a newbie must be
> able to be guided from the time he doesn't know about BR to the time it is
> printed "Hello with my BR distro" on his target "screen". Some people here
> more or less say that it's not the job of BR to take care of the user on
> this part but I think they are terribly wrong. The aim is not to manage the
> board specific stuff, but to address common best practises to setup an
> embedding development toolchain (that *DOES* include the target programming
> part).
>
> I personnaly think that BR has an hard work to do on user friendlyness, and
> I did see that at first as an expert tool for expert people. These doc
> updates aimed at helping in this way.
> Just FYI, have a look at what is a model about user friendlyness in the same
> domain :
> https://www.yoctoproject.org/
Yeah, true.
Unlike yocto/OE, Buildroot is community driven with officially no
entity behind to support it.
So, we do our best, but obviously it's not enough ;)

Also, IMHO, although we'd like to be as good and do as much as yocto
(for instance)
does; we cannot easily... because we want to keep things KISS, easy to
scratch up,
easy to hack, easy to integrate in everyone's workflow.

>
>
>>
>> without even saying it. I'm not sure "Beyond Buildroot" is really a
>> good name for the section, etc.
>
>
> You may change this, I didn't have enougth experience with BR and its
> documentation to be able to name this correctly.
>
My feeling is:
- right now, we have a generic solution for emulation: qemu targets/defconfigs,
they are certainly not advertised enough in the current documentation;
- the qemu targets boot instructions are available through a readme
aside the defconfig;
- this virtualization stuff reminds me something about disk and device
image generation,
that we agree to provide host-tools for it, maybe post-image sample
scripts too, but
almost nothing more;
- I don't like losing this work. Someone spends time to gather it
because he/she felt
there was a gap to fill and to help others.

I think the "generate an x86 vm" from Buildroot is another specific
case that belongs to
the post-image actions.
So, its right place may not be the manual, but some extended readme
and/or sample
post-image scripts.
What about this?


Regards,

-- 
Samuel