I've been really blown away by the breadth of the Yocto Project; not only will it help you create a distribution for a device but it can also help you create things like a -dev image or a self-extracting SDK.
Sometimes I like to work with a "sub-Linux" device, something that is too small to run Linux, or a device on which, for whatever reason, I've decided I don't want to run Linux. I've been wondering lately if, theoretically, it would be possible to use yocto to create a development environment for such projects (specifically an SDK). Sometimes these devices need specialized software tools (e.g. flash programmers), or maybe you need to use the vendor's special, hacked-up version of binutils/gcc. Often these projects have instructions pages on how to setup your environment, and for the most part these instructions work fine and will produce something which with you can work. But sometimes the development environments they create are... strange. For example, they'll leave you having to provide long argument lists to gcc so they can find all the relevant headers and libraries. Nothing tragic, but just cumbersome. It would be nice, I think, to be able to create a yocto layer and provide recipes that would allow a user to very easily bitbake a development environment for, say, an ST Discovery board. These recipes, then, would follow the vendor's instructions, but using yocto all these instructions could be performed with one simple step (which would then make use of bitbake's powerful fetching, sstate, and cross-building tools). Is the concept of "I'm going to build a distribution/root-filesystem for you" too deeply engrained in the logic of the Yocto Project that it couldn't be used to only build -native tools and assemble an SDK? _______________________________________________ yocto mailing list yocto@yoctoproject.org https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/yocto
