muddle - CPIO support in packages

There is a new version of muddle, which addresses issue 201: Allow CPIO file creation by a package, not just by a deployment, and also has some internal amendments which should not be visible.

muddle - "no invocation"

Muddle is updated, but you shouldn't be able to tell the difference...

This update is tagged "no-invocation", and is mostly an internal technical change.

Short description: wherever you have written "builder.invocation." you can now write "builder.", leading to shorter lines in your build description, which is a Good Thing. However, "builder.invocation." will continue to work.

Long description: after the cut.

New muddle "quickstart"

The muddle documentation has now gained a "Quick start" section, at http://muddle.readthedocs.org/en/latest/quickstart.html. I've also added an introduction, which more-or-less matches the front page text on Google Code.

Change to behaviour of "$ muddle" in src/

I have just changed muddle so that the behaviour of a "bare" muddle
anywhere under src/ has changed.

Muddle v2.4.4

I've just pushed muddle v2.4.4. Changes below the cut.

Cross-compiling Python for arm, with muddle

This week I needed to cross-compile Python. The "local" platform is an x86, and the target is an ARM. My specific purpose is to be able to use the KBUS Python bindings on the target platform, which means I also care about things like ctypes.

Unfortunately, Python is not terribly simple to cross-compile, partly because it relies on building itself twice. Luckily, someone else has already documented what to do - namely Paul Gibson at http://randomsplat.com/id5-cross-compiling-python-for-embedded-linux.html. That blog post describes the problem, provides the necessary patches for several versions of Python, and then describes how to build it at the command line.

(At time of writing, it doesn't have a patch for Python 2.7.3, but 2.7.2 is recent enough for our purposes, and still available from http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7.2)

So the issue becomes simply how to amend the procedure for a muddle environment.

More muddle improvements

To wit:

• visdep (in the sandbox) now uses 'xdot' to display, not 'xdot.py'. This means that on apt-get based systems, sudo apt-get install xdot should suffice to install the dependencies needed for visdep to work.
• The output of CPIO file generation is tidied up and made easier to understand (although still terribly verbose), and the irritating (at least to me) warnings have been fixed (this was a bug in applying instructions, in fact).
• muddle status will now detect if a git checkout is behind the remote repository, without needing a git fetch, and also reports the checkouts that need attention at the end of its output. See muddle help status.
• A long-standing bug has been fixed in cleaning deployments - this makes packages depending on deployments (which Richard introduced a while ago) work that bit better.