Last week I celebrated my 5th anniversary at MontaVista, and was telling a co-worker a story about some previous engineering experiences.

At a previous employer I was on a small engineering team responsible for producing a commercial Linux distribution. Our “build system” was 1) a guy on the East Coast and, 2) some scripts on his workstation - the workstation could never be updated or modified lest we risk breaking the build.

A large conference was coming up and we needed to demo our latest software, so we crunched to get the latest bits checked in and our build guy produced some DVD images and FedEx’d them to San Francisco. We receieved the DVDs on a Friday afternoon, only to discover that upon booting the new OS the kernel panic’d.

With less than 2 days to get the system ready to ship over to the conference, and the East Coast build guy off for two weeks of vacation, the two West Coast engineers (myself and a co-worker) spent the weekend in the office pulling apart SRPMs, manually patching sources, and doing whatever we needed to cobble together something that would boot and demonstrate the applications we had ready for the show.

The products we shipped at that company were enterprise-oriented, and so the build system was really only critical to our internal process - our customers never ripped the system apart, even though it was Linux-based and they had every right to do that. Now that I’m out of Enterprise and in Embedded, I see that customers almost always want to take our products apart and put them back together to customize for the embedded devices they’re making. IMHO, this makes a build system a basic necessity of any embedded Linux product, and I’m glad MontaVista has been able to rally around the open-source build engine
bitbake and ship it in our latest product.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 4:03 pm and is filed under build.