[Solved] OpenWrt SDK minimal for building packages only

For Developers
#1

What is the correct and easiest way to set up OpenWrt for building packages only, and not the firmware ?

The reason for asking is, from a developers perspective of building packages, lately with OpenWrt 18 and 19 (after scripts/feeds install -a), even with SSD, doing a make package/packagename/compile takes 5-10 seconds before actually starting to build the package.

I've been using a handful of (proprietary) SDK's based on OpenWRT that only build the host build tools (m4, libtool, crosstools-gcc etc), and the packages. They are super fast to work with while developing a package. Also in chaos_calmer, the speed of building single packages was acceptable, but then the package count was much less I think. Perhaps it is just related to how many packages that are installed in the SDK.

#2

Building and using the SDK should achieve exactly that.

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#3

Any suggestion to make it faster ?
It would help if someone had walked this path before. I can of course try reducing the number of packages.I've tried that before with a lot of strange build problems.

#4

The SDK already comes with zero packages, and it starts almost immediately for me.

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#5

What about make path/to/package/compile?

Misclicked answering to @jow instead of @hansd

#6

OK. You don't have to do scripts/feeds update -a; scripts/feeds install -a ?

#7

You don't. You can update and install a single feed.

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#8

Well the idea is to only install the feed packages you need (./scripts/feeds update -a; ./scripts/feeds install some-single-package)

If you install all packages from all feeds (install -a), it’ll slow down metadata handling significantly, leading to the delays you described.

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#9

Thanks. I'm giving it a try now. I have tried it before, and I think the problem I had then was that when installing my own packages, I had trouble with the dependencies my packages had when they (the required packages) were not installed in the SDK.

#10

I get lots of these. Is this because they are not installed in the SDK ?

WARNING: Makefile 'package/utils/busybox/Makefile' has a dependency on 'libpam', which does not exist
WARNING: Makefile 'package/utils/busybox/Makefile' has a build dependency on 'libpam', which does not exist
WARNING: Makefile 'package/network/utils/curl/Makefile' has a dependency on 'libgnutls', which does not exist
WARNING: Makefile 'package/network/utils/curl/Makefile' has a dependency on 'libopenldap', which does not exist
#11

Likely you'll have to select and "install" the feeds for all packages (including libraries as well as dependencies of dependencies) your target package is dependent on.

#12

These warnings should be harmless

#13

Thanks this helped a lot on build time. I think the thing i've done wrong in the past is that i didn't do a scripts/feeds update -a before installing custom packages. This time the dependencies got installed with the custom packages.

#14

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#15

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