@clacke Rosinstall seemed promising, but I wanted to avoid the dependency. I skimmed over wstool, but I should take a closer look.

(I'm still dealing with yocto and bitbake. Bitbake seems like clever idea taken too far: We'll just make everything a string combined with a framework that operates behind the scenes on those strings that does stuff. The relationship between the things in your strings and the actions they cause is not clear by inspection.)

@cstanhope Bitbake is a clever idea not taken far enough. The caching is broken, and bit me multiple times, and the bash-but-not-just-bash configuration language is horrible and yes, the abstraction levels are convoluted and disorienting -- there's no clear way to find out where all these settings are coming in from. By the time bitbake is taken far enough it becomes Nix, and at that point they should have just used Nix to begin with and saved a decade of effort.

A start at doing something like yoctolinux but Right is @telent 's NixWRT(0)(1), built using Nix and a lightly patched nixpkgs.

It does less than bitbake so far, but without even trying it out, I know that its caching is not broken, because it is using Nix.

(0) github.com/telent/nixwrt
(1) invidio.us/watch?v=0K1qn60X2HI…

@clacke Thanks for the links. I'll need to check those out. It's not a high priority, but I would definitely like to move away from Yocto if possible. The only reason I'm using it now is because upstream vendor (Freescale/NXP) used it. I now realize Yocto may help solve vendor's problems (and they can apparently afford the brittle complexity), but doesn't necessarily help solve small team, downstream OEM problems.

@cstanhope I'm not saying use that, it's more of a proof of concept. If you get inspired, by all means, but I meant it more as a curiosity.

@clacke Oh, no worries. I took it that way. I'm in a collect research in the background mode on this topic anyway. So it's perfect. :)

@clacke @cstanhope @telent OMG, I'm very excited to see somebody building a NixWRT. I recently helped a client mangle NixOS into a static root file system builder for a different purpose, and while there are clearly some upstream changes that would help, it worked really nicely in a lot of ways. I'd love to see Nixpkgs/NixOS evolve into a Yocto replacement!