[oe] Getting Started -Makefile

[Tim Bird]

Rod Whitby wrote:
> Does the OE core team simply not want people to use OE unless you are a
> distribution developer?

This is an interesting option.  I have thought what I would do
if I were making an OE-based distribution available to
my own downstream customers (CELF test lab users, at the moment).
I would NOT request that they learn OE.  The learning curve
is too steep.

In a former life, I worked on a large and ornate build system for
Lineo.  We did a fairly interesting thing there (IMO), where
we had a mechanism to capture all the individual commands used to
build the distribution, and create a straight shell script. The
script allowed a customer to reproduce that exact build.  The sources were
pre-expanded, and the whole thing was put into an archive that
people could download.

If users wanted to customize the build, they could apply patches
or modify individual commands in the script.  To actually insert
these back into Lineo's build system, it required that they learn
how our system worked (or, more commonly, they just sent their
changes back to us).

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Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Corporation of America
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