Emdebian has long described itself as an "official sub project of Debian" but this status has never actually been granted by Debian. The discrepancy recently led to discussions with the Debian Project Leader and on the debian-embedded mailing list [0] about integrating Emdebian into Debian so that the status of Emdebian can be decided properly.
It rapidly became clear that Emdebian could integrate the Emdebian Grip flavour more closely with Debian and that such integration was desirable both within Emdebian and within Debian. At DebConf11 [1], discussions took place with representatives of the ftp team, wanna-build team and the release team around the mechanisms by which Emdebian Grip [2] could be integrated directly into the main Debian archive and Debian release process. This is the technical side of the thread I started about Emdebian Policy. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/08/msg00153.html The discussions have resulted in quite a few points which I've now put on the wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/EmdebianIntegration Please refer to the wiki before raising possible technical problems. The summary is that Emdebian has a binary compatible distribution which has been released in sync with Debian since Debian 5.0 (Lenny), called Emdebian Grip. The binary compatibility and suitability for embedded devices has led to this flavour becoming very popular with embedded users - commercial and hobbyist. Grip supports amd64, i386, armel, mips, mipsel & powerpc. Unofficial ports are also available for armhf, sh4 and powerpcspe. Grip consists of ~3,000 packages, all of which are binary compatible with the equivalent Debian package but ~40% smaller, on average. Processing of packages for Grip is entirely architecture-agnostic and 98% automated. This proposal would make it easier to ensure Grip is in sync with Debian by allowing the ftp team and release team to use existing tools to manage both sets of packages at the same time. Integrating Emdebian Grip into Debian would involve parallel suites (unstable-grip, testing-grip, stable-grip, stable-proposed-updates-grip etc.) with a restricted package set. (Grip is currently at ~3,000 binary packages out of ~30,000 in Debian.) Emdebian would sort out a buildd-type process which receives the list of binary packages passing through the archive, filters the ones which are interesting and then uploads the converted package to the parallel suite. There have not been nor will there be source changes to packages, source packages are not interesting to the Emdebian Grip process other than for compliance. No re-compilation takes place. dpkg-buildpackage is not called, debian/rules is ignored. All processing is done by unpacking the .deb, removing/compressing files and repacking it with a temporary changelog entry. To distinguish the converted packages and the Debian originals, Emdebian Grip packages already use the em1 suffix and this would be retained. reportbug already has support for directing bugs to buildd.emdebian.org if this version suffix is found. (Strict dependencies are managed during the "grip" process.) Requests for adding more packages would go through the buildd.emdebian.org pseudo-package on the BTS but additions are far from automatic. One of the principle gains of Emdebian Grip is that the Packages.gz file is small. Not only is this helpful in download time, it also dramatically reduces the amount of data apt-cache needs to load, write and process on-device. Tools already exist in Debian to add more packages to a base Emdebian Grip package set on a user-specific basis using the 'apt-grip' script in the emdebian-grip package. To make the integration process work, Emdebian has agreed to drop the dev, debug, java and doc components from Grip unstable and Wheezy (which are all just sub-divisions of 'main') in order to make this process work - all packages will revert to the "main" component and Emdebian would gain support for contrib and non-free (although no packages currently exist for those components in Emdebian Grip). packages.debian.org will be able to list the new suites and the versions available within those suites as well as a comparison of the file list and package sizes. In a similar manner to udebs and the experimental suite, a suitable warning message can be added to the page. packages.qa.debian.org could list the parallel suites too, in a similar manner to the Ubuntu listings - although no patches would ever exist for Grip. I should also be clear that Emdebian has two main flavours (Grip and Crush) and a third "meta-flavour" called Baked. These changes *only* affect the binary-compatible Grip flavour. Just describing these packages as "Emdebian" may lead to confusion in bug reports. This is why the proposed suite names include "grip" rather than "emdebian". Lots more information on Emdebian on the http://www.emdebian.org website and the Embedded_Debian parts of the Debian wiki. [0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-embedded/2011/04/msg00013.html [1] http://debconf11.debconf.org/ [2] http://www.emdebian.org/grip/ -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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