Hello.
I am maintaining small arm tree built with gentoo crosstools. My
rootfs is based on busybox, which has implementation of udev (called
mdev). My questions are about bad things i found while working with
it.

Recently i have to compile sys-devel/libtool to get libltdl - one of
its runtime libs. The ebuild has following deps:

RDEPEND="sys-devel/gnuconfig
>=sys-devel/autoconf-2.60
>=sys-devel/automake-1.10.1"
DEPEND="${RDEPEND}
|| ( app-arch/xz-utils app-arch/lzma-utils )
sys-apps/help2man"

I think that auto* tools are not required on target system for ltdl to
work. More, those auto-tools implicitly require bash which is not
installed in system.

I solved the problem by fixing the ebuild in local overlay but it is
just workaround. Should i register a libtool bug? Maybe (just guess)
one should split libtool into 'runtime' and 'buildtime' packets?

Here is another issue:
Lets look at dev-libs/openct ebuild.

RDEPEND="pcsc-lite? ( sys-apps/pcsc-lite )
usb? ( virtual/libusb:0 )
>=sys-fs/udev-096"

My system doesn't have udev. It has mdev from busybox. Openct docs
says that mdev is ok, so should i register an ebuild-bug and suggest
something like 'udev useflag'? There are util-linux dependencies,
which are also incompatible with busybox. I am in doubt.

Will be glad to hear your opinion.

--
Thanks,
Sergey

On 23/04/2010 12:20, Sergey Mironov wrote:

My system doesn't have udev. It has mdev from busybox. Openct docs
says that mdev is ok, so should i register an ebuild-bug and suggest
something like 'udev useflag'? There are util-linux dependencies,
which are also incompatible with busybox. I am in doubt.




The "gentoo" way as near as I can see is via virtual packages, eg if
there are three cron options then you install virtual/cron and various
packages then provide that dependency.


With udev it's a little harder to fit it into that mould (actually same
with all busybox utils) because basically bb can provide different
things depending on config...


I think it's a hard problem to solve and a small number of affected
users. Probably as a workaround you should simply set package.provided
to claim you have installed udev and then all the dependencies are
effectively assumed to be solved. Of course this will break down on
some package that really does need proper udev, but it's probably
acceptable?


A use flag is probably inappropriate because that's usually used to
indicate whether you want that functionality compiled or removed from a
given package


I guess there must be some -arm overlay that you can base from and
contribute to? Anyone?


Good luck

Ed W

On Fri, 2010-04-23 at 15:20 +0400, Sergey Mironov wrote:
> Hello.
> I am maintaining small arm tree built with gentoo crosstools. My
> rootfs is based on busybox, which has implementation of udev (called
> mdev). My questions are about bad things i found while working with
> it.
>
> Recently i have to compile sys-devel/libtool to get libltdl - one of
> its runtime libs. The ebuild has following deps:
>
> RDEPEND="sys-devel/gnuconfig
> >=sys-devel/autoconf-2.60
> >=sys-devel/automake-1.10.1"
> DEPEND="${RDEPEND}
> || ( app-arch/xz-utils app-arch/lzma-utils )
> sys-apps/help2man"
>
> I think that auto* tools are not required on target system for ltdl to
> work. More, those auto-tools implicitly require bash which is not
> installed in system.
>
> I solved the problem by fixing the ebuild in local overlay but it is
> just workaround. Should i register a libtool bug? Maybe (just guess)
> one should split libtool into 'runtime' and 'buildtime' packets?
>
> Here is another issue:
> Lets look at dev-libs/openct ebuild.
>
> RDEPEND="pcsc-lite? ( sys-apps/pcsc-lite )
> usb? ( virtual/libusb:0 )
> >=sys-fs/udev-096"


Sounds like openct should use virtual/dev-manager vs a hard-coded udev
dep. But then again there is probably a reason that the dev opted to use
>=0.96, so you should probably read the ChangeLog and dig around to
perhaps see why. It could be something as simple/silly as gentoo
providing an init script to go along with it.



>
> My system doesn't have udev. It has mdev from busybox. Openct docs
> says that mdev is ok, so should i register an ebuild-bug and suggest
> something like 'udev useflag'? There are util-linux dependencies,
> which are also incompatible with busybox. I am in doubt.
>
> Will be glad to hear your opinion.


You should file a bugs for both the libtool problem and the openct
problem with the respective maintainers. Feel free to CC: embedded@ on
the bug.