How do I Add a A Package To Buildroot Which Is Available In A Git Repository?

Question

I'm making an embedded Linux system and I wanted to add the 'bluez' package (and bluetooth utilities) to the packages of the Buildroot environment.

Unfortunately the tar ball seems to be unavailable but the source is available from Git repositiory but I'm not sure how I can include this in the .mk file.

Can I do this and if so how?

Answer 1

Buildroot already has a bluez package, which will be part of the upcoming 2011.11 release. In the mean time, you can either use the latest Git version of Buildroot, or back-port the bluez package into an older version of Buildroot.

Coming back to the initial question, Buildroot is capable of fetching source code from Git repositories. As stated in the documentation, you simply need to do:

MYPKG_VERSION = some_commit_id_or_tag_or_branch_name
MYPKG_SITE = git://thegitrepository
MYPKG_SITE_METHOD = git

in your .mk file.

Answer 2

It looks like there are tarballs of the bluez package already available. A Google search for "bluez" yields http://www.bluez.org/download/, which has links to several tarballs.

If for some reason you really want the code from the Git repository, you can make a local clone of the repository and then use the git archive command to create a tarball. See git archive --help for the documentation.

Depending on your needs, you may also be able to build directly from your local copy of the repository (rather than creating a tarball only to unpack it again in a later step).