"Beyond Buildworld" (was Re: RFC: "Crochet" build tool)

[Tim Kientzle]

On Apr 4, 2013, at 10:40 PM, Adrian Chadd wrote:

> Hm, how about something a bit more modular?
> 
> As in, adding hooks to make release / nanobsd / tinybsd to let us tie
> in the embedded platform requirements, like building bootloaders and
> such;

George is setting up a DevSummit track for BSDCan (the
"Beyond Buildworld" WG) about this exact issue.
Will you be there?

I'll be there and here are a few of the issues I'd like to discuss:

* What hooks are appropriate?   In part, Crochet is an experiment
   to explore ways of factoring these issues, but I don't know
   release or nanobsd well enough to judge whether the
   ideas I'm coming up with would fit well into those.

* How do boot loaders get managed?  Crochet has been
   downloading, patching, and building directly from upstream
   sources, but that's getting tedious fast.  Can we maintain boot
   loaders as ports?[1]

* What policy should FreeBSD project use to determine which
   specific boards to release official images for?  For that matter,
   should the project release "official images" at all?  Or should
   we leave that in the hands of other parties?

I'm not expecting to come up with final answers to these
at BSDCan, but I'm hoping to get enough people involved to
at least enumerate some of the avenues to explore.

Tim

[1]   If someone wants to try creating a port of some boot loader
as an experiment, I'm happy to collaborate on integrating it into
Crochet to see how well that works.  I would suggest trying
to build a port for RPi U-Boot as a first proof-of-concept.