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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Coincidentally I tried this recently. I dunno if I liked it. It uses the kernel's `make menuconfig` system which seems like it occupies a bad place between "easy usable GUI" and "robust config file you can check in to git".

Once you've configured it it then does a lot of downloading and compilation of random stuff and it's all strung together with janky shell scripts which means it's almost guaranteed to break.

I got some weird errors that returned zero google results and the source of the error was a long awful shell pipeline involving `sed`, `tr` etc.

Doesn't scream quality.

I gave up and switched to manually compiling Linux and OpenSBI (which is really all I needed so buildroot was overkill anyway). Went much smoother and I actually vaguely understood what was happening.

I haven't tried Yocto, maybe that is better engineered.

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I've generally found buildroot work pretty well. One common problem causing weird issues however is lots of tools from the host system are used (without any sandboxing). E.g building old releases of buildroot on newer Ubuntu will break.

Its biggest Achilles heel IMO is the need to always compile everything from scratch with no possibility of caching. Also the fact that incremental rebuilds after changing config options isn't guaranteed to work unless you manually know to know which packages to force nuke and force to recompile (this is intentional design choice for implementation simplicity and well documented). Also having two different boards that inherit from common shared config isn't really supported, everyone just rolls their own custom config splicer at that point.

Yocto fixes those issues, but IMO the most other things are much less ergonomic. While buildroot is extremely simple, yocto is total opposite to that, an architecture astronaut's dream. There is custom language to learn, ton of functionality, config and documentation split in tiny files in different repositories. Of which everyone using slightly different subset to accomplish almost the same thing.

> It uses the kernel's `make menuconfig` system which seems like it occupies a bad place between "easy usable GUI" and "robust config file you can check in to git".

Are you aware you can generate a sparse config file with `make savedefconfig`? Maybe you're aware of that and it doesn't meet your definition of robust, which is reasonable.

I think Buildroot is much better engineered than Yocto, in the sense of simplicity. Buildroot is fundamentally just a bunch of make and kconfig. Yocto has some powerful features but I find it to be considerably more difficult to penetrate "what is actually happening here". I haven't had as negative an experience with Buildroot error messages, but if you think those are bad, Yocto errors are like g++ template errors circa 2010.

For a buildroot alternative that solves many of these problems, without going to the complexity of Yocto, see ptxdist: https://www.ptxdist.org/

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