On 27/05/15 17:15, Laurent Bercot wrote:
> On 27/05/2015 16:49, Didier Kryn wrote:
>> I am slowly trying to assemble a minimal Linux development
>> environment and the number of tools you need to just compile a C
>> program is unbelievable. Clearly, the majority of developpers don't
>> care about simplicity.
>
> Amen to that.
>
> I built my home router by hand. A vital piece of software for a router
> is netfilter. It's very basic, very low-level, close to the kernel,
> and I just needed ONE command-line tool: nftables.
> I'm sorry to say that building netfilter by hand from scratch was the
> single most painful journey into crap dependencies that I've ever taken,
> and I've taken a few. I needed to install more software to actually
> BUILD the stuff than my whole router takes to RUN.
>
> Non-exhaustive list: autoconf, automake, bc, bison, curl, flex, gmp,
> libmnl, libnftnl, libnl, libtool, libuuid, m4, pkg-config, readline,
> sed, tar, xz, zlib. (Maybe some of these weren't used by nftables,
> but some other stuff such as hostapd. I don't remember. And yes, the
> busybox versions of commands such as sed, tar or xz were insufficient
> because they're called with long or non-POSIX options. GNU or GTFO.)
>
> I remember I managed to avoid installing Python to build libuuid -
> I drew the limit at Python, and would have given up if I had had to
> build that. But if you systematically disable every configure option
> that mentions Python in every piece of sh^H^Hsoftware you build, at
> some point you'll be able to progress without it.
>
> Ah well. I can't hate too much, my software requires GNU make 4.0
> (which is 4 years old), and I still received complaints about it
> because people were trying to build it with GNU make 3.81 and failed. :)
>

Hello Laurent,

I am not sure what kind of platform your router has. As far as, I know
most home routers use mipsel platform. And I have been using OpenWRT for
years, and I had no significant issues even to re-compile Debian
packages for my mipsel based home routers. It has a good buildroot
(http://wiki.openwrt.org/about/toolchain), so I have never had
experience to go though all the troubles that you had.

Cheers,

Anto