[LEDE-DEV] [PATCH] tools: upslug2: Utilize existing bz2 archive

[Daniel Golle]

Hi Felix,

On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 11:47:08AM +0100, Felix Fietkau wrote:
> On 2016-11-23 22:00, Florian Fainelli wrote:
> > http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources has a copy of the sources, but under
> > tar.bz2 file format, so utilize this one since the SVN server is down.
> > 
> > This showed up with attempting an orion target build.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli at gmail.com>
> Since upslug2 is not used by the build, I would suggest removing it from
> tools/ instead. The NSLU2 devices are not widely used anymore...

They are certainly are bit outdated, however, I recently flashed a
LEDE snapshot to an IXP4xx based SLUG and it worked like a charme and
now provides a small samba fileserver in a friend's place with very
poor connectivity -- other than most of today's NAT boxes the slug
actually got an RTC and the battery even still works up to today ;)
Well, I had to enable upslug2 also for the ixp4xx target to be able
to actually flash the device... (despite the popularity of the device
10 years ago OpenWrt/LEDE could be the last resort when it comes to
tools and a working OS for that hardware).

The slug was the first hackable Linux-based ARM box available to
consumers world wide for an affordable price.  They come up with
RedBoot/ecos, thus can be un-bricked using this tool without the need
to attach a serial console. There used to be a whole cluster of
specialized distributions which apparently have all been abandonned;
I consider that whole story to be an important piece of history which
happened in parallel with the WRT54G and shouldn't just be neglected
as 'yet another piece of outdated gear'.

Actually, there are still quite a number of them in the wild -- and
imho they provide an interesting edge- case being the smallest and most
obscure (Intel's xscale ARM implemented with *big endian*) platform
supported by the most minimalistic embedded Linux distro out there.
Many people started embedded hacking with those boxes and are familiar
with the expected performance (hence the name 'slug') and constraints.
Code which even works well on the slug should work pretty well on
practically all platforms today.

Just my 2cts...


Cheers


Daniel

> 
> - Felix
> 
> 
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