To start with, I had an old failed rockbox for openwrt that I never quite got working right. It runs, but horribly, and eventually I lost interest and moved on. Shoulda took that as a warning. Stay away. But no, I fired up the old P3 with my openwrt setup on it and updated all the git archives following Anarsoul's instructions. At least I thought that's what I was doing. Apparently the browser still had a cached version of the instructions from last February when I was working on the rockbox build. And the cached instructions contained a typo. A dash character in one of the feed names prevented me from building the qi repositories with the links package that I wanted. For several hours! The guys on IRC were quite helpful, and we eventually worked out the problem only to discover the instructions on the internet were already fixed, and probably had been for months.
See. There's the typo, right there. Can you spot the difference?
Oh well, moving on. So I started the P3 building the goodies and watched for a few minutes before... guess what? Hard disk failure! Aargh! Stupid old 80GB external drive developed a bad superblock. I sorta remembered this drive gave me trouble before so I decided to abandon it and get a newer one rather than try to fix it. Someday maybe I'll try to recover the bad rockbox build with one of the backup superblocks.
The next day I nabbed a 500GB drive from one of the kids and started over. I refetched all the openwrt archives, followed the correct instructions to setup the feeds and started the build again. Then I went to sleep, exhausted but hopeful. The build failed a few times on supertux, the kbd package, and libmpg123 so I had a few restarts to do the next day. But eventually it built everything else I'd selected. Gotta see what's up with kbd and libmpg123 since I may want them someday. But for now I'm gonna build with IGNORE_ERRORS=m to keep it going after failures.
Anyhow, the links package compiled so I just needed to apply my patch from IZ2S and rebuild. Or so I thought. I tested the patch in the directory with the links sources and it applied cleanly. Cool. However when openwrt compiles, it wants to wipe out the directory with the package sources, start fresh, and apply it's own patches. But it took a while to figure out how to remake my patch the way openwrt wants it. You need to make it run with patch -p0 so the destination directory name in the patch must match exactly with the directory name in the package tarball used by openwrt. At least I think that's the case. It's hard to see exactly what the byzantine openwrt build system is doing, even with the V=99 command line option.
I got some more hints from the IRC guys on how to reproduce the openwrt build environment so I could manually step through the patching and configuring and try and fix the broken parts. I don't think I ever completely reproduced the environment but got close enough to figure out some of the trouble spots. Apparently for openwrt you need to make a makefile for each package that runs configure to create a makefile for the package. Hmmm. I examined the existing meta-makefile and attempted to convert the tricks used to configure directfb into tricks that would configure links for SDL. It didn't exactly work. The openwrt build process was successfully applying my patch, but failing during the configure stage because it couldn't find SDL. I tried looking at some other packages like nupdf and sdlwidgets for SDL config hints, but to no avail. As many things do, the answer crystalized in my sleep, and when I woke up I found the sdl-config program I needed in the openwrt-zipit/staging_dir/target-arm_v5te_uClibc-0.9.33_eabi/usr/bin directory. I fixed up the meta-makefile with that path. Now the configure stage managed to find SDL and moved on... only to fail writing the new makefile. Syntax error in the patched configure script! Did I already say arrgh!?
Now, the original SDL patch from the internet required me to rerun autoconf to create a shiny new configure script (and Makefile.in) with SDL options. I did that for my IZ2S build, but I have no idea how to do that in the openwrt environment. Also, different versions of autoconf tend to generate a completely different output files. And configure is over 600MB! So I'd attempted to make a small patch for the configure script that would paste in only the changes involving SDL and skip all the gratuitous changes caused by the different version of autoconf. That got me all the way to the syntax error. I took another look at my patch, and the modified configure script, but that's not work meant for humans. Hand editing 600MB of butt ugly machine generated script file is not my cup of tea. Even the mighty emacs with it's color syntax highlighting and electric parenthesis matching wasn't helping me deal with the horrendous tab formatting. So instead I gave up and changed the openwrt meta-makefile to replace the whole 600MB configure script with the one I'd regenerated earlier with a different autoconf on a different PC. Oh well. It's kludgy, but it works.
Not Fail! Yeah!
The new openwrt Makefile, patches, some zipit friendly config files, and key docs are on github.
I put up the links-sdl_2.3pre1_pxa.ipk package for openwrt zipits, with config files and a kbd cheatsheet.
Here's my wrt-env.sh script (modified from slugs).
Update: Anarsoul added PKG_FIXUP:=autoreconf to the Makefile to auto-magically regenerate the correct configure script as part of the openwrt build process. And projectgus pulled it all into the master github project, so you should be able to get the links package from the usual place. Cool!
Meanwhile, here's a qemacs executable for openwrt. I still need to learn how make it into a real openwrt-zipit package...
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