The last month I have been toying with a nokia tablet and specially gstreamer and to develop the software I have used scratchbox and would like to share some feelings.

What I like:

• Easily get the patched source of a package
• Easily rebuild packages using dpkg-buildpackage
• But these are attributes of the Debian system and not scratchbox

What I can’t stand with scratchbox:

• Taking 8GB of my disk space not having ping or mc installed.
• Not having mc in their repository!
• Using scratchbox takes away my tools, my vimrc, I actually have two setups and I don’t see the difference between /scratchbox/login and ssh into a qemu, bochs, virtualbox, vmware…
• DNS stoppped working inside the scratchbox environment, even if the resolv.conf are the same
• I can not do git-init and then do dpkg-buildpackage
• I have to reboot and use an older kernel (VDSO is not enabled in the Ubuntu hardy kernel) to use scratchbox
• The Nokia maemo install shell script is proprietary…
• Scratchbox is not rebuildable, I tried many times
• and the list continues
• it requires root privileges to install

To summarize: What I really like is the exposure of debian, easily rebuild and patch the packages! What I don’t like is probably the rest and what makes scratchbox up. So instead of getting my work done I have to reboot my computer, copy files in and out of the cloned home directory of scratchbox, have to setup my GDB, vim and other configs and find out why networking stopped working in my scratchbox login.

With one sentence: I love the Debian tools, Scratchbox is a PITA and I can specify –build, –host and -.target.

(written after another reboot to be able to call /scratchbox/login)