It’s now a tradition: the Buildroot project organizes one of its Buildroot Developers Meeting right after the FOSDEM conference. 2019 was no exception, and the meeting took place from February 4 to February 6, a three days duration, instead of the traditional two days duration from the previous years. Once again, the meeting was sponsored by Google, who provided the meeting location and lunch for all participants. Bootlin participated to the event, by allowing its engineer Thomas Petazzoni to join the meeting.
The meeting was a mix of discussions on various topics and actual hacking, with a focus on reducing the backlog of pending patches. The report synthetizes the most important discussion items:
- A short general assembly of the Buildroot Association took place
- Some discussions around the download infrastructure took place, related to the re-introduction of the
make source-checkfeature and the issue of tarball reproducibility with version control system download backends - Discussion about introducing Config.in options for all host packages, an idea that we decided to not pursue for the moment.
- Discussion about the instrumentation hooks that are used to collect the list of files installed by packages, and how we can achieve this goal in a way that is both efficient and reliable
- Discussion on which Qt5 versions to support
- Discussion on participating to the Google Summer of Code. We wrote a few topic ideas and applied as an organization for GSoC 2019.
- Discussion on how to integrate support for systemd sysusers mechanism
Reading the work on the pending patches, we managed to reduce the backlog from about 300 patches to around 170 patches, which is a very significant achievement.
More specifically, Thomas Petazzoni took advantage of this meeting to:
- Finalize his work on the pkg-stats script, to include details about the latest available upstream version of each Buildroot package. To do so, it relies on information provided by the release-monitoring.org website. The information is not yet accurate for all packages, but the accuracy can be improved by contributing to release-monitoring.org. The updated package statistics page now provides those details, which will help ensure Buildroot packages are kept up-to-date.
- Review in detail the patch series from Adam Duskett introducing support for GObject Introspection. It is far from a trivial package due to the need to run during the build some small binaries using Qemu. While the series is not merged yet, we have a much better understanding of it, which will help complete the review process.
- Do a final review and apply the lengthy patch series reworking the
fftwpackage. - Participate, as a Buildroot co-maintainer, to the pending patches backlog cleanup, by reviewing and/or merging a significant number of patches.
It was once again a very nice and productive meeting. The next meeting will take place as usual around the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, in October, in Lyon (France).
