[LEDE-DEV] Vagrant file for Lede development

[Alberto Bursi]

On 10/09/2016 07:05 PM, Simon H wrote:
> I'm looking to contribute in some small way once again.
> Not being a regular linux user, creating a build environment for
> Lede/OpenWRT has always been a time-consuming process for me.
>
> However, on other projects, I've begun to use Vagrant (specifically
> VVV for web development).
>
> Although completely new to vagrant, it's working well for me, and so i
> thought i'd give it a try for Lede.
>
> The result is on github:
>
> https://github.com/btsimonh/lede-vagrant
>
> If people think this is a good way to encourage developers to 'join
> the cause', then maybe we could host something similar in the Lede
> github, and add a 'start developing with Lede' page referencing it?
>
> looking forward to hearing comments/suggestions...
>
> best regards,
>
> Simon
>

Hm, another thing that might be useful to package with vagrant is the 
Image Builder. https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/obtain.firmware.generate

It's a thing that generates firmware images with a custom set of 
packages without recompiling from source (downloads packages from repos 
and creates the image).

This tool is useful for those that want to make a custom firmware image 
but have no need to recompile everything from source. (= it is a tool 
for end users, not developers)

The tool works only in linux 64bit, so again people without a linux 
system can't use it without setting up various things themselves.

I think you can reuse 99% of the current setup you use for the "lede 
development environment deployment", so it should be quick.

One usecase is making extroot-ready firmware images for devices with 4 
MiB of storage and USB/Sata/sdcard ports, so that they can use the 
external mass storage device to install packages.

Or also firmware images wil luci (web-interface) and 
announce/avahi/zeroconf already embedded, as currently none has yet 
changed anything about the buildbots and they still make barebones 
ssh-only images.

Or to fit the most packages possible in the embedded flash, as the 
imagebuilder dumps all packages in the root squashfs highly compressed 
read-only filesystem, while installing packages in the router goes in 
the overlay jffs2 partition which is much less compressed, but read-write.

-Alberto