Re: Thoughts on Nokia from a long time Zaurus user
 

Ah, well I still think that building for the Zaurus (with OE and bitbake) is easier. This is mainly because you can use other people's work to build your deps. Atm with the Nokia machines you need to search high and low, and then probably get bored and decide to compile things yourself. This may change once people start using the extras repo.

The other thing I don't like is debian packaging, especially for apps that haven't already been debanised. I need to investigate a makeipkg style script to package up my binaries. Perhaps this is just my lack of understanding of how to use the debain tools, but it would be nice if you could run ./configure and make, then run some debian tool that would parse the Makefile and produce a .deb from the binaries that have been created.

Re: Thoughts on Nokia from a long time Zaurus user
 

Long-time 5500 user here too. Welcome!

Re: Thoughts on Nokia from a long time Zaurus user
 

Welcome Hans. First and farmost, thank you for the fair feedback. You didn't expect a DVD Writer in a form factor the size of a keychain. That probably immediately earned you some friends here. :)

Re: Thoughts on Nokia from a long time Zaurus user
 

Whoa, wait a minute! You can't burn dvds with this thing!!

Re: Thoughts on Nokia from a long time Zaurus user
 

What? Doesn't yours work?

Re: Thoughts on Nokia from a long time Zaurus user
 

Som'*****! I got me a dud! :rolleyes: :D

Re: Thoughts on Nokia from a long time Zaurus user
 

Well, it's a difference between looking for apps to install and looking for apps to build.. for installing, certainly the choice is still a bit limited for the Nokia. For building, I just start with looking at the 20000+ Debian packages in desktop Debian, and apt-get source them. Then some minor adjustments to the debian/ build files (get rid of docu, sometimes simplify the install/removal scripts, nothing much), and off you go. (Gettting GUI apps Hildonised is another, more tricky issue).

As I mentioned the available selection of debian-packaged software is _huge_ at this stage. But if you have to do it yourself you have at least a couple of options:
1) Look at existing debian packages, preferably those already prepared for the Nokia. When you find a simple one, mimic it for your own software. It's just to add a debian/ directory, add a few files, then run 'fakeroot debian/rules binary' and it'll do all the configuration and building for you.
2) Or look at the 'cdbs' debian support system. It's what I use for things I debianize from scratch. It's a set of tools which makes it really simple. (Note that I haven't tried to use this for a scratchbox environment yet, so I'm not certain it's fully supported there.)
3) Or just build manually, and use PyPackager to make your debian package. I haven't used it myself, but it should do the right thing for you. Made by the distinguished ITT member Khertan: http://khertan.net/ Just pack up your installation root to e.g. an SD card and use PyPackager to make it into a deb.

Re: Thoughts on Nokia from a long time Zaurus user
 

Good point.

If you know what is supposed to be in the rules file and in the meta files used to generate the dependencies, etc., then yes, all's well and good. If not it's just a pita trying and seeing whether it works. The rules files are often rather convoluted and confusing (e.g. even when doing something simple like altering the configure flags). The other thing I find annoying is the deps, and trying to work out the correct names for them.

With that said, I probably just need to get used to it.

Sounds ideal to me, certainly for making test packages. If extras starts taking build recipes, etc., then creating a proper debanised package will be worthwhile.

Thanks for the tips,

Simon

Re: Thoughts on Nokia from a long time Zaurus user
 

There's also mud-builder, which is a little like cdbs but aims to make it easy to port source tarballs and existing Debian packages to Maemo's specific requirements within Scratchbox.

Graham Cobb uses it, for example, to build his up-to-date GPE packages.

Cheers,

Andrew

Re: Thoughts on Nokia from a long time Zaurus user
 

Most of the time I use just
in the debian/control file, which works it all out for you. This is normally sufficient for applications which simply depend on shared runtime libraries (e.g. libc, libgdbm, that sort of thing). Sometimes you'll need to add something yourself, say, if your application needs Perl to work. A 'dpkg -S `which perl`' should come up with the name perl-base, so the Depends line would be
for example.

And thanks to Andrew for mentioning mud-builder, which I had forgot to include in my list.