False and misleading information

I’m doing some automated builds of OpenWRT here, and was running into problems with the .config file, package dependencies and versions across multiple feeds. Specifically, I have a very very tiny .config file that lists a package and platform, and that pulls in just about everything else it needs. However, depending on the order of feed update and install, (And particularly, when using ./scripts/feeds/install -a) the wrong version of one of the dependencies was being pulled in.

Now, if all feeds were instantly and magically updated in the OpenWRT upstream repository, this wouldn’t be a problem of course :) Unfortunately, that problem isn’t going away, so what to do?

Well, basically, get simpler. Originally I had a giant .config file copied out of a manually configured buildroot, a feeds.conf with all sources, and the build script ran

1. ./scripts/feeds/update -a && ./scripts/feeds/install -a
2. make -j5 V=s

That way’s crap. The new way runs with a much much much smaller .config file, onyl about 10 lines (enough to specify the platform, a “master” package that depends on what we want, and one or two things we explicitly don’t want) Then, it’s a matter of calling feeds install -p feedname -a IN ORDER so that if there’s a package in one feed that depends on a package in another feed, that the dependency’s feed is installed first.

Specifically, this happened here when our “master” project depended on mosquitto, which is both in the stock feed for trunk, (at v0.15) as well as in the company maintained public feed (at v1.0.3) The order of the install -a call was pulling in the mosquitto dependency from trunk first.

So, the new cool way…

1. cp tiny.config .config
2. ./scripts/feeds update -a
3. ./scripts/feeds install -a -p owrt_pub_feeds
4. ./scripts/feeds install -a -p private_feeds
5. make defconfig
6. make -j5 V=s

Much better.