[yocto] build host toolchain

[Stath, Paul]

I was recently tasked with migrating our Jenkins based build server to new hardware.
During this migration, the OS was also upgraded to the latest Ubuntu LTS release.

The previous build server was hosted on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
The new build server is hosted on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

We have a couple of existing Yocto projects which are based on older Poky releases.
The Freescale SDK that is being used is based on Dylan.
So alas, no updating to Fido. (sigh)

During the migration, I had trouble building these two projects due to newer versions
of tools on the build host platform.

Specifically:

tar:         v1.26   -->  v1.27.1
texinfo:     v4.13   -->  v5.2
perl:        v5.14.2 -->  v5.18.2
gcc:         v4.6.3  -->  v4.8.4

The tar command in 1.27.1 got more stringent on argument parsing and refused to allow
the '-s' argument in concert with '-c'.
(Note: this is patched by commits bf19a8617d05f17506dcb7154e19e2aa2b61838b
and d3846f06d1e3faedcbc3c28e22c427bb0088683d, which were introduced in 'dora'.)

In texinfo, between v4.13 and v5.2 the parser became a lot more strict,
and several recipes failed when generating documentation.

In perl, the pod2* programs also also became stricter, and several recipes
failed when 'pod2man' was used to generate man pages.


I was able to work around these issues by downloading and compiling the
old versions of the above tools, and installing them in a non-standard
bin directory, and adding that to the beginning of PATH prior to running bitbake.

The real pain was the errors that occurred because of the gcc compiler on the build host
going from v4.6.3 to v4.8.4.  I suppose I could have solved it as above,
compiling a v4.6.3 version of GCC and putting it at the beginning of PATH.
However, I ended up cherry-picking commits from Dora that corrected the issues.

It looks like a buildtools-tarball target was added in Dora to generate
a stable set of build host executables.
The packages in the recipe (Dora) are python, chrpath, tar, git, pigz, make.

Has anyone backported the buildtool-tarball recipe to pre-Dora releases,
and could one bbappend other native packages such as texinfo-native, and gcc-native?

---
Paul Stath
Senior Software Engineer
Axxcelera Broadband Wireless
email: pstath at axxcelera.com


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