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Comment by kev009 | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to overstate how awesome build.sh is. If you have some powerful desktop/laptop running virtually any modern POSIX OS, you can easily build for an embedded board like an RPi or Beagelboard, obscure retro targets, or standard systems all the same. The closest thing is maybe Yocto Linux, but a whole lot easier to use and understand.

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If you run older hardware you realize quickly how significant it is to be able to do cross builds with build.sh. I came across this post today that highlights this!

https://zia.io/objects/c4b825f9-8c57-4b86-a108-af869dfbcb10

> How long would you imagine it might take to compile NetBSD 10 from source on real m68k hardware? Earlier this year I wanted to find out, so I set up a Macintosh to try it.

> The toolchain, OS and installation sets started on 16-March and finished on 10-May:

> build.sh started: Sat Mar 16 17:04:20 UTC 2024

> build.sh ended: Fri May 10 00:35:54 UTC 2024

> 4692724.22 real 3810544.56 user 700310.18 sys

I misread that. It started on Mar 16 and ended on Mar 10? How did that OHHHHhhhh...

That's not so bad! :-D

My yocto linux builds have a single entry point that is a build.sh. And they’re like 20 lines.

I've heard this about various Linux distros, but every time I've tried it has never been as simple as people say it should be.

I assume your twenty lines has customizations. How do you rebuild the OS and kernel the simplest way possible?

The short answer to the last question is, blow away the cache and download dirs and run build.sh

My build.sh clones down 5 repos, inits the bitbake environment, and builds. This bit is 12-15 lines.

Because I have to work around work infrastructure, about 10 lines of build.sh make symlinks into bitbakes previously-cloned folder structure for things that should be native recipes, but cannot be. Really no magic at all, the symlinks piss me off.

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