Emdebian at Extremadura, Spain. Sept '08

September 8th, 2008

A short meeting in Extremadura, bringing together Nick Bane, Neil Williams, Hector Oron, Aurelien Jarno Goswin von Brederlow, Riku Voipio, Wookey, Colin Tuckley, Per Andersson, Hedda Kamp, Bernhard Fischer, Alexander Shishkin and Simon Richter.

The meeting started with an quick overview including:

How it works (svn/patch structure, user commands)
Debconf update (translations, gconf stuff)
Audit planned 2009
Current state of autobuilding

Other developments included:

Exploring the need for an Emdebian system based on coreutils instead of busybox.
Significant reductions in the size of glibc and tzdata for Emdebian (courtesy of Aurelien), expected to save 5Mb in all Emdebian root filesystems.
Improving uClibc support in Emdebian
Work on separating libgcc1 from gcc-4.3 to make it easier to build.
Improving performance on the Emdebian web server
Exploring CMake support in dpkg-cross
Decide on DEB_VENDOR implementation details and how this could reduce the number of patches needed by Emdebian.
Highlighting and discussing problems with Emdebian changes that modify functionality of library and application packages - issues to be resolved during the Code Audit in 2009.
Goals and flavours for Emdebian Squeeze
1. Emdebian crush - maximally squeezed with dependency changes, package name changes and a lot of work to ensure that Debian packages can still be mixed in.
2. Emdebian grip - smaller amounts of squeeze, as few functional changes as possible and highest level of compatibility with Debian.
3. Clearer support for native builds of Emdebian packages.
Emdebian crush would be targetted at v.small devices and aim to get a GUI below 64Mb and a basic busybox/dpkg/apt install in under 20Mb. Maxi would also be the main area for uClibc versions.
Documentation improvements including:
- idea for a search function within the website - possibly using Goole.
- Collate ToDo pages into one page
- Make the homepage more friendly to new users
- Possibly include a series of tracking links, akin to a lot of Wikis.
- Improvements to the Emdebian wiki pages.
debhelper patch for tags in packages.* files
MTD partitionining developments
Balloon3 networking improvements in Emdebian

A short keysigning was also done during the meeting.

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