To build Gluon, after checking out the repository change to the source root directory to perform the following commands:

git clone git://github.com/freifunk-gluon/site-ffhl.git site # Get the Freifunk Lübeck site repository - or use your own!
make update                                                  # Get other repositories used by Gluon
make                                                         # Build Gluon

When calling make, the OpenWRT build environment is prepared/updated. To rebuild the images only, just use:

make images

The built images can be found in the directory images. Of these, the factory images are to be used when flashing from the original firmware a device came with, and sysupgrade is to upgrade from other versions of Gluon or any other OpenWRT-based system.

For the build reserve 6GB of disk space. The build requires packages for subversion, ncurses headers (libncurses-dev) and zlib headers (libz-dev).`

There are two levels of make clean:

make clean

will ensure all packages are rebuilt; this is what you normally want to do after an update.

make dirclean

will clean the entire tree, so the toolchain will be rebuilt as well, which is not necessary in most cases, and will take a while.

So all in all, to update and rebuild a Gluon build tree, the following commands should be used:

git pull
(cd site && git pull)
make update
make clean
make

The autoupdater

Gluon contains an automatic update system which can be configured in the site configuration.

By default, the autoupdater is disabled (as it is usually not helpful to have unexpected updates during development), but it can be enabled by setting the variable GLUON_BRANCH when building to override the default branch set in the set in the site configuration.

A manifest file for the updater can be generated with make manifest. A signing script (using ecdsautils) can by found in the contrib directory.

A fully automated nightly build could use the following commands:

git pull
(cd site && git pull)
make update
make clean
make -j5 GLUON_BRANCH=experimental
make manifest GLUON_BRANCH=experimental
contrib/sign.sh $SECRETKEY images/sysupgrade/experimental.manifest
cp -r images /where/to/put/this/experimental
mv /where/to/put/this/experimental/experimental.manifest /where/to/put/this/experimental/manifest

Development

Gluon IRC channel: #gluon in hackint

To update the repositories used by Gluon, just adjust the commit IDs in modules and rerun

make update

make update also applies the patches that can be found in the directories found in patches; the resulting branch will be called patched, while the commit specified in modules can be refered to by the branch base.

make unpatch

sets the repositories to the base branch,

make patch

re-applies the patches by resetting the patched branch to base and calling git am for the patch files. Calling make or a similar command after calling make unpatch is generally not a good idea.

After new patches have been commited on top of the patched branch (or existing commits since the base commit have been edited or removed), the patch directories can be regenerated using

make update-patches

If applying a patch fails because you have changed the base commit, the repository will be reset to the old patched branch and you can try rebasing it onto the new base branch yourself and after that call make update-patches to fix the problem.

Always call make update-patches after making changes to a module repository as make update will overwrite your commits, making git reflog the only way to recover them!