Re: Status of Emdebian Grip

On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 2:31 AM, Neil Williams <[email protected]> wrote:
> 4: I've stopped needing to use Grip in any active manner. My work now
> concentrates on ARMv7 and later, where storage is simply not a concern.
> Most of the ARM devices I now use and care about support both 64Gb SD
> and SATA.
>
> 5: The only "maintained" suite in Grip is unstable - where the
> maintenance involves automated scripts which are principally aimed at
> the full Debian integration which is still delayed.
>
> Riku commented, when Grip was first announced, that storage was not
> going to remain the principle problem for Emdebian systems and the
> availability and affordability of 64Gb SD cards means that this is now
> the reality.
>
> Emdebian Grip has no role in "resource limited" deployments other than
> reducing the storage requirements, so if the ARM boards currently in
> active usage have no practical storage limits, it is time to reconsider
> the work involved in maintaining Emdebian Grip. (Other architectures
> were added to Grip simply because we could, there never was any
> particular use case for architectures other than armel. Most armhf
> devices had already moved away from storage constraints. Reducing the
> number of architectures in Grip would not reduce the complexity of the
> update process at all.)

Even on the Sheevaplug NAND, which is limited to 512MB, I found
emdebian too difficult,
and resorted to dpkg-exclude= and dpkg-include= (along with ubifs zlib
compression).
I believe that dpkg-exclude=, along with efforts to reduce the number
of packages in debian
(such as mandating the use of build-id's for dbg symbols and then making dbg
symbols automatic and in their own new type of repository) is the way forward,
rather than emdebian grip.

-- 
Shawn Landden
+1 360 389 3001 (SMS preferred)