Recent Posts:
What is a Developer's Advocate? - Posted to Playing Developer\'s Advocate by Jefro on June 11th, 2009
Developer Advocate. It has been on my business cards since I arrived at MontaVista last fall, but I don't know if it has ever been defined in print. This blog's name is a play on the term "playing devil's advocate", but what does it actually mean to be one? What is the role of a Developer Advocate in the world of open-source? The short answer is that I am an ambassador for Linux developers, currently acting within this corporate structure. Obviously I have a vested interest in helping MontaVista succeed. What that means to me, though, is that a major component of that interest is to help embedded Linux developers succeed in general, partly because they may someday become MontaVista customers, but mostly because they help to advance the cause and penetration of the current best embedded operating system. As a community admin, technical writer, and developer, I have several avenues by which I advocate. One is that I help to administer an open community called Meld. Meld is sponsored by MontaVista, but it is truly open, meaning that anyone can join and discuss any embedded Linux topic, including the.. (Read More)
MVL6 Tricks, Part #1 - Posted to Open Device, Insert Code by Brad Dixon on May 22nd, 2009
So what do you do when you get a new toy? You race around trying out all of the fun stuff you can do with it, of course. It is no different with me now that MVL6 is in beta and being used by developers. As previously mentioned the integration platform capability of MVL6 is a big new feature. My last post mentioned many of the benefits including more easily reproducible builds and clear traceability of all build inputs to the outputs. A simplified diagram of the system looks like this: The entire process is controlled by recipes and there is full transparency and traceability between source and metadata inputs and the build products that are produced. What kind of build products are there? Quite a few, in fact. Prebuilt filesystems that can be deployed to targets Packages in a variety of formats that can be used for deployed device upgrades Various manifest files describing what was placed in the built images Original source archives and patches suitable for distribution to satisfy various licensing obligations As an example, after doing a quick test build of the busybox and less software packages you can see the source code ready for distribution: $ ls tmp/deploy/sources/*/tmp/deploy/sources/BSD/: less-418.tar.gz less-418.tar.gz.md5tmp/deploy/sources/GPL/: busybox-1.13.2-depmod.patch.. (Read More)
