would be desirable to have a live-cd-bb osmocom

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Pierre Pronchery khorben at defora.org
Tue May 24 23:16:49 UTC 2011


			Hi all,

On 23/05/2011 10:08, Harald Welte wrote:
> Hi Lokkju and others,
> 
> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 12:56:38AM -0700, Lokkju Brennr wrote:
>> If we just create a Debian dpkg that packages all the osmocom
>> functionality, it'd be really easy to pull off with Debian Live.

some packages are available in the hackable:1 project:
http://trac.hackable1.org/
http://build.hackable1.org/debian/dists/wip-oldstable/main/

As the last URL suggests, I haven't updated them for a while though :/

> That is not that easy.  You will first need to package a
> cross-toolchain, and then include the source code for at least the
> OsmocomBB firmware.  Also, how to cleanly handle the libosmocore
> cross-compilation in a debian package is probably not that simple.

It is not easy, but feasible. I have used the toolchain from the
Emdebian project, and managed to cross-compile libosmocore.

The GSM applications compiled this way did not fully work though. It
would be really nice if OsmocomBB's code could support more toolchains;
I'll try to investigate this myself if I can find some time for this.

> For OpenBSC, packaging stuff is easy and fine.  But OsmocomBB, it is an
> entirely different story.  I think there's no alternative to simply
> include the git repository and have people compile the specific
> branches they want, with manual TX enabling, etc.

Right, this is another issue altogether. There also, it would be great
if some features could be enabled through command-line arguments, but I
also understand why this is not always feasible/desirable even. As for
choosing branches, that's going to be the case for pretty much any
software package in any distribution, and my preference goes for
tracking "stable" code, and therefore track the "master" branch by default.

For the record, my packages were using the master branch indeed, with TX
disabled IIRC.

> The other issue with distributing a live CD with lots of exceutable code
> is of course license compliance.  This means at least for all
> GPL/LGPL/AGPL licensed code, the complete corresponding source code has
> to be offered and made available.

hackable:1 also features a script to generate ready-to-boot images, and
could be extended to generate live CDs. Since it is based on Debian and
fully open source, GPL compliance should not be an issue.

>> I might be interested in building the packaging scripts if no one else
>> is already working on it.
> 
> I've recently posted a call for a dpkg package maintainer.  This would
> be a start for libosmocore, openbsc, openggsn, etc.

TBH, I do not want to be that maintainer; but my work should be easy to
grab and maintain.

> Next steps would be:
> * package a suitable cross-toolchain

There is emdebian, but as mentioned, it is (was?) not fully functional
on the target side of things.

> * make osmocom-bb host programs use the libosmocore on the host

Isn't this managed by the code upstream, rather than packaging?

> * create a package for the cross-compiled (target) libosmocore

Isn't the library automatically included in the final applicative
images? (I haven't had a look at the project for a while, sorry)

> * provide an apt repository of all the packages (and source packages)

hackable:1 can do that too.

> Creating the Live CD is the easiest and last step.  Please don't start
> with the last step before the preconditions are met.

:)

HTH,
-- 
khorben




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