[LEDE-DEV] Snapshots for ARC770 & ARCHS38

[Alexey Brodkin]

Hi Jo,

On Thu, 2016-08-18 at 15:13 +0200, Jo-Philipp Wich wrote:
> We really need to find a way to combine that, that subtarget churn is
> taking precious resources.
> 
> Any subtarget change requires manual intervention on the builders,
> manual intervention on the rsync mirrors and between 30 to 50GB of
> additional disk space, not taking into account the additional CPU time
> needed to build 99% identical code.

I understand that and introduction of a new subtarget was just the last resort
for me. Initially I had an impression that I would set ramdisk as a feature of
a particular profile but that didn't work for me - ramdisk was enabled that way
for all profiles.

> Can't we just make initramfs optional and require people to build it
> themselves if they need that?

Indeed I may leave initramfs selectable in menuconfig and depending on its
state one or another set of images (for different devices) will be built.
But what I don't really like in that approach - there will be implicit dependency.

What I mean if user wants to build for device that uses SD-card image -
that's straight-forward, default settings will bring it to you.
But if you'd like to build for device that is unlucky to accept SD-card image
you may just guess OpenWRT/Lede doesn't support that device.

Because again - I tried to distinguish initramfs/non-initramfs builds
per-profile but that didn't work for me unfortunately.

> I mean who uses initramfs builds in
> production anyway? This sounds more like a debug sort of thing to me.

Well, really? "git grep ramdisk" shows (except ARC): 
 * apm821xx
 * ar71xx/mikrotik
 * rt3050
 * ramips/rt305x

So ramdisk is used still here and there and we need to take care of it
anyways.

BTW I expected that kind of discussion on the mailing list when send
my last patch-set. Instead entire series got silently applied :)

-Alexey