Hi,
After scraping together my own little distribution, and having had a look at what's out there, I wanted to provoke some discussion regarding the offerings out there.
What I need (and if I need it, I can't be the only one): a high-quality, open source distribution that I can customize and recompile from source. It's got to be small, but not tiny, although something that scales down would be great.
*) Debian/EmDebian - I'm a debian developer, so my first thoughts turned to this group. I think the regular distribution, modulo some issues with making timely releases, is the best there is.The good: runs on lots of architectures, cohesive codebase that has packages which are tested together, widely known and used. Tons of packages available.
The bad: the source format doesn't let you easily keep track of changes you make to the deb sources so that it's easy to upgrade to a newer version of the package when the time comes.
*) OpenEmbedded - They seem to have a lot of good ideas and smart people, but a fiddly implementation.The good: it's a build system that lets you create your entire distribution, from sources, including the toolchain. They have quite a few packages, and what seems to be a reasonable dependancy system.
The bad: it's got lots of little variables that need to be manipulated in order to make it work. Additionally, the weird Python build system in use is a memory hog. Apparently, they want to create their own build system in C, but that looks likely to be a long road. Something else I don't like is that by default it tries to use the very latest packages out of CVS. You can set a specific cutoff date for one or more packages, but I like the idea of working from a "known good" set of packages that have hopefully been tested together.
*) Snapgear - I get the impression they are reasonably popular, and one of the developers is a frequent poster to this newsgroup. I haven't played around with it that much.The good: it looks reasonably well integrated, and supports lots of different systems. Seems like it builds out of the box well.
The bad: it's documentation could be improved - it leaves you a bit confused as to what you should configure where if you don't have one of the boards mentioned. It would be very nice if it offered to help you set up cross compilation tools. A "standard x86" build would be nice in order to test the distribution out. Doesn't seem to come with a way to keep track of your own patches and upgrade the system.
*) Denx - I didn't try this one out. I don't care for the fact that it's based on Yellowdog, of all things and makes use of RPM's (I don't care for .debs to be involved either, if not as packages for the host environment).Other things to look at? I hope this area coalesces some over time, because there are a lot of smart things going on, but they all seem to be lacking pieces.
One thing that I think would be useful to see in all of these is a "dump out a quick x86 system" so that it would be easy to start trying them out.
Thanks, Dave Welton