Re: Condensing and re-coding programs to save space

On 2017-02-27 17:02, Marc-F. LUCCA-DANIAU wrote:
> The unit tests for networking that I grouped in /elkscmd/test should 
> not be included in the default images (because "test"...), and would 
> be removed in next commits to make room. But we should also provide a 
> more convenient way to customize the image, for a developer to be able 
> to quickly add them back when doing non-regression testing.
I think that the current way of using Makefile stuff to decide what goes 
in an image does need to be replaced with something more flexible.
> Today we have to modify the Makefile to include / exclude a program, 5 
> different targets for partial / full images, multiplied by the 
> available image formats. Plus now a build_hd_image script that is not 
> consistent (and IMHO, poorly designed as it unpacks an existing image 
> to build another one, in place of building it directly).
I accepted it because it does the job of making a bootable hard drive 
image; it does need to be changed in the future, but it is a nice 
stop-gap measure to make more free space available on a root image while 
all this testing work is being done.
> Would be far better to follow the Buildroot / Busybox way, and to 
> select the applets to be installed on the target in a single location. 
> We already have a quite nice kernel configuration tool, why not using 
> it for that selection and the choice of the image format ?
Well, see...that's a problem. The ELKS kernel uses a really old copy of 
Kconfig from Linux and when I looked at extracting the one used in a 
more modern Linux source code base the task was far from trivial. A lot 
of ELKS was cobbled together well over a decade ago. I'm open to moving 
to a more all-encompassing build system if someone wants to do it, but 
it certainly will not be a simple task.

-Jody