[maemo-developers] sbox2 & maemo

[From: Lauri Leukkunen]

Hi,

Scratchbox2 can now be found in debian, unstable and testing carry frequently
updated releases of it. I've been going over a number of packages trying
to test it. I think it's pretty good considering the limited amount
of people using it, and the fact that the public maemo rootstraps are an 
insult to all root filesystems.

Most problems arise from maemo being totally geared towards SB1, which
is terribly unfortunate. It has resulted in rootstraps being stripped
of many essential packages to make them even marginally useful, all because
SB1 has kindly provided those and even pretended that its versions
satisfy build-dependencies for them. Target images are quite a bit more
useful, but require special tools to extract files out of jffs2 images,
I'm not even sure if these tools are available outside Nokia?
I know that internally Nokia has rootfs tarballs that are very close
to what's needed by SB2, so not much needs to be done to improve the
situation. I hope the right people read this.

Continuing on the topic of build dependencies, SB2 has an open design issue
regarding them. Since SB2 is using the host system to provide most (all) 
of the build tools, build dependencies of packages need to be checked against
the host. But then again build dependencies contain -dev packages (libraries
and headers) which need to be in the target buildroot, so the build
dependencies need to be checked against the target as well.

Obviously the easy solution would be to require all build deps on both host
and the target, but this is not very practical. Therefore I would need
some way of reliably identifying what should be checked from where. Any
ideas are welcome. The raw mechanism is already in place to call
dpkg-checkbuilddeps for both transparently, but now we'd need to figure out
the logic.

Now a little bit about target emulation, since that's always popping up
when scratchbox is discussed. SB2 is *seriously* not going to do it in
the default mode of operation. Instead there is so called "emulation mode",
used through the -e switch to sb2. That's still using user-mode emulation
with qemu, but effectively does a pseudo chroot. It's not as good as
system-mode qemu, but useful for running apt, dpkg and related tools
to maintain the target root. It also shouldn't be considered as a real
target emulation environment to be used for application or system
development. So people would normally do something like this when using sb2:

sb2 -e apt-get update
sb2 -e apt-get dist-upgrade
cd ~/src/my_package
sb2 dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

It might be a good idea to try to automate the use of emu mode for apt and dpkg,
might save some headaches down the line. Shouldn't be too hard to detect
normal invocations of them.

Nokia and Maemo community really need to figure out an easy way for 
developers to use the real hardware and system-mode qemu. Those are the 
only adequate solutions for testing and debugging of software.

Also note that SB2 is totally not interested in doing x86->x86 development,
like what many people are doing today with SB1. People need to wake up, smell
the coffee, integrate with debian proper and get with the program. It's
stupid to maintain a lame x86 port of maemo which nobody wants when all the
components should be pushed to debian and ubuntu and get those bigger
communities involved in their development. One day we will anyway be
running debian/stable with a few custom components on the tablets.
That was the aim with this whole debian thing in the first place, remember?

regards, Lauri