Why no mention of gentoo (or funto)? I concede very little experience of yocto, etc, but I’ve a fairly complex system I maintain for both x86 and amd64 custom boards, all with quite heavily patched packages. I was challenged to add an imx6 board to the mix but I concede it was rather straight forward... for kicks I also switched out uclinux-ng for musl and switched up binutils versions, but it was all fairly painless...??

If you are familiar with gentoo it has a package manager called portage. You type “emerge packagename” and it installs it. Prepend ROOT=blah and it installs it in that dir instead!

So your build scripts are pretty trivial. Just write a bunch of emerge lines and you are done. Install in your new root, then package that ROOT. Simples!

Building from source could be slow, so cache binaries once built. Subsequent binaries will be used by adding “-k” to emerge above.

Profiles allow you to build target versions of software, E.g. customising compile flags or software versions. I use both a libc and a processor profile. The arch profile is also split between host and target, so for example static libs might be installed on host but not in target.

I used an overlayfs system to trim the delivery.

I think the big difference is I can rely on this huge distribution. Yet if I need some platform patch I need only drop it in my patches directory and hit rebuild. Put the patches dir in git and I’ve got a trackable distribution!

Comments?