Re: Feedback from using Crosstool-NG

[Bryan Hundven <bryanhundven at gmail dot com>]

Dan, Tom, list,

My message is inline...

On Sat, Jun 7, 2014 at 10:17 PM, Dan Wilder <Dan.Wilder@watchguard.com> wrote:
> A common corporate requirement is that toolchains should be built exclusively from material already situated on the corporate version control.  This provides complete traceability and insulates against things going unavailable at some time in the future, should it be required to rebuild a toolchain for example to change an option or fix a bug.

As regression testing a toolchain for a system is a complex topic, and
I wish not to discuss here unless totally necessary. That starts to
diverge into off-topic conversation.

> At WatchGuard Technologies we make use of Crosstool-NG, currently to build a gcc-4.8.2/glibc219 toolchain for x86 and PowerPC.  Our requirement is typical in that the build must rely only on materials previously enrolled in version control.
>
> Fortunately it is very easy to do that, in part because of some changes submitted to Crosstool-NG by Bryan Hundven a few years ago.  A small wrapper script is required, to pre-position the material from the corporate version control, and a few configuration options are required.

:blush: a wrapper that I probably helped to write.

> If there is interest I'm happy to send to the list the current wrapper being used, and information as to the configration options required.  The wrapper could easily be modified for use with other version control systems.
>
> --
> Dan Wilder
> ________________________________________
> From: crossgcc-owner@sourceware.org [crossgcc-owner@sourceware.org] on behalf of Thomas Petazzoni [thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com]
> Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2014 10:23 AM
> To: crossgcc maillist
> Subject: Feedback from using Crosstool-NG

Thomas, list, ... et alii...

> Hello,
>
> At Free Electrons, we regularly use Crosstool-NG, especially in our
> embedded Linux trainings. I gave yet another training last week, and I
> have a bunch of feedback I'd like to share with the Crosstool-NG
> developers (most of it was already reported by Yann privately, but I
> thought that sharing it publicly and by writing was probably better).

I love feedback! It is my favorite form of criticism.

> Comments are:
>
>  * The current arm-unknown-linux-uclibcgnueabi sample does not build,
>    because cloop-ppl 0.15.9 is no longer available online.

Send a patch! :-D

>  * The strategy of Crosstool-NG to try gazillions of download locations
>    and file extensions is silly, and actually harmful. In certain
>    corporate environments, trying to download through ftp causes
>    timeouts. Or even when http is used, when the server is not
>    responding, it causes timeouts. I have seen cases where I had to
>    wait more than one minute for a download to start, just because
>    Crosstool-NG was trying dozens of possible locations before finding
>    the relevant one. In Buildroot, we use one single URL for each
>    tarball, and it works just fine.

This is a problem I also do not like. I also feel that being able to
test crosstool-ng with future "snapshot versions" of software helps to
maintain the regression tests that I previously mentioned... lets talk
off-topic (off ML) about this subject!

>  * The arm-unknown-linux-uclibcgnueabi sample is horribly old: gcc 4.4
>    (while gcc 4.7 is close to end-of-like), uClibc 0.9.30 (we're at
>    0.9.33), binutils 2.19 (we're at 2.24), gdb 7.1 (we're at 7.7).

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2014-February/089789.html

>  * It would be good to have a arm-unknown-linux-uclibcgnueabihf sample.
>
> Surely, I could contribute patches to implement some of these things,
> but I never managed to get around to use Mercurial, and since the
> number of projects using it is so small, I don't really see the point
> of learning :)

I love working on this project. I truly have a passion for this
project! I also want to see it move to git, so that more people are
able to make contributions without going through the mercurial
workflow ramp-up! Please work with Yann E. Morin to move this to git!

I constantly submit updates to crosstool-ng, when I have time. Time
permitted, I've had very little to do anything but support users of
this tool and try to spend the little time (very little; have a 4 year
old...) I have on multilib support, which I believe will help out many
people that use this product.

> Thanks!

Thank you! For the feedback and constructive criticism! I personally
appreciate it!

> Thomas
> --
> Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
> Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
> http://free-electrons.com

-Bryan

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