Maemo DP team blog

Chinook SDK Tools

I wanted to write a few words about the tools released last week with the Chinook SDK.

The Chinook SDK is a collection of libraries, tools and resources that enables you to develop new applications and port existing ones to the IT OS2008.

With the SDK we wanted to release tools that are known to work and that are also used internally for software development in order to provide a verified set of utilities for you developers in the maemo community.

The tools and the SDK are now in the same repository and this has created a situation where the omission of certain library -dev packages has raised some eyebrows. The reason for this omission is that those libraries are only needed as a run-time dependency for one or more of the tools that are in the same repository. It is also an indication that if your application needs to use that library, you need to make sure it’s available for the non-developers from some other repository than the SDK, preferably from the Chinook extras repository. Your application should not depend on something that’s only available in the SDK repository.

There’s a plan to provide a separate tools repository the next time we publish an SDK. This will hopefully make the separation of the tools and the SDK more clear. This will also make it safer to activate just the tools repository on the device without having to worry about all the ‘noise’ the SDK repository creates in the Application Manager.

From Bora to Chinook

In Bora SDK the included tools were a small collection of standard Linux tools. This time with Chinook we’ve released more well known tools and also some that were developed internally and haven’t been available to the open source community before.

Oprofile is now available accompanied with a graphical user interface. Valgrind has been updated to a new version along with gdb in order to better support glibc2.5.

Most of the internally developed tools and helper scripts are in packages named “sp-something”. These utilities help in tasks like simulating different kinds of system load or collecting and analyzing debugging data or just provide help in starting up the various other debug tools correctly. The main goal of these “sp-tools” is to offer a variety of utilities to help you increase the quality of your applications by facilitating easier and more powerful testing.

The tools documentation pages were updated and the tools were categorized by task to help new developers easily see what’s available. Each tool that got categorized has its own subpage with a description, usage examples and links to other sources of information.

The new main page for the tools is http://maemo.org/development/tools/.

There are still some pending “sp-tools” in the Chinook pipeline. These will be available for you from the SDK repository in the near future. I’ll be sure to advertize them when the time comes.

Your friendly tools guy signing off. Happy hacking!

-Juha