​Upcoming build system changes

[Ryan Cairns]

​Hey Team, 

As we’ve been growing and working with more partners, the need to support board specific builds and improve our tools has become more urgent. In order to get there more quickly we’ve been investigating several different build tools. We found that the Portage build tools suit our needs well and we will be transitioning 100% within the next week. 

To date, we’ve completed the following  

• cross compiling from source for both ARM and X86 targets
• support for vendor/board specific builds
• the builds are automated and are running on our buildbot
• the docs are ready and you can get started with the new build today

We still have a lot more work to do before we’ll be satisfied with where we’re at, but over the next week our goal will be to get everything working perfectly with the new build system. 

Thanks,

-Ryan

[Ashish Khosla]

Hi Ryan,

The Portage-based build instructions don't mention anything about building the chromium browser or downloading a chromium binary - is this subsumed into one of the ./new_... build scripts?

(A portage build I did yesterday - build on EC2 64-bit karmic instance, image/... copied to 32-bit laptop for non-chroot ./image_to_usb.sh - behaved interestingly - it booted into a familiar blue chromium os screen but without any obvious means of login.)

Thanks!

Ashish

[Matt Richards]

Confirmed on IRC today, the current revsion only downloads a binary of
the browser from the buildbot. Plan is to have it compile the code
eventually though.

Question I have though, do the vmware/virtualbox scripts still
function with the new system? The directions don't cover how to create
a vmware image from the new system..

--
--Matt

[Nasser Grainawi]

Looks like so long as you give it a --from=<path to rootfs.image dir> it
should work.

The new build system sticks those images into dirs under src/build/images/*

If you run ./new_build_image.sh, you'll see it print this at the end:
"To convert to VMWare image, outside the chroot, do something like:"
" ./image_to_vmware.sh --from=${OUTSIDE_OUTPUT_DIR}"

Nasser