I’ve been looking into the problem of creating an economical notetaker for blind users, using something like a RasPi as the hardware platform. This would require various packages (e.g., BRLTTY, eSpeak, Orca) which tend to be available via the apt (Debian) and pacman (Arch) commands.
I’d rather not have to create and maintain ports for these packages and I don’t know anything about Buildroot. Can it take advantage of either of these package management ecosystems? If not, what’s the Golden Path?
I think the nerves environment is drastically stripped down in a way that it isn’t compatible with any packaging system.
I would even say, its less than alpine linux, which includes a busybox and libmusl besides the kernel, nerves includes neither as far as I know and just provides a statically linked prebuilt erlang version to run your code.
I haven’t done much nerves beyond blinking LEDs though, therefore all I have said right now is based on some talks I’ve seen and experiences I made 3ish years ago.
That’s my understanding as well. Last I checked the entire disk usage of nerves + your application was on the order of a few dozen megabytes.
However, Nerves uses https://buildroot.org/ as the base linux, which does have a certain kind of package manager. This is however for very low level stuff like bluetooth stacks and so on.
