How does one make a .tcel?

[zaphod]

Making a standard .tce / .tcz is fairly straightforward from the wiki instructions.. but how does one include the libraries too? , which is what I understand a .tcel file to be.
  Perhaps this is very obvious or has been explained elsewhere. Do we have to manually figure out the dependencies with 'ldd' and pull them into [prefix]/lib before tarring?

btw, thanks for the excellent work in putting together TC. Have found it to be an ideal system for DIY embedded projects.

[robc]

A .tce and .tcel are the same. the only difference is that a .tcel extension has libraries in it, i.e. .so or .a files. When building an extension with libraries, just name it extension.tcel instead of extension.tce.
The .tcem files are similar, but instead of libraries it is for modules.
There are also .tcelm and .tceml files, which are the same and include both libraries and modules.

The extra characters in the file name extension tell the tce-load app to run ldconfig or depmod. Though it is looking more and more like everything is packaged with a library. Perhaps in the future ldconfig and depmod will be used after every installation?

[zaphod]

robc, thanks for the clarification. If I understand it right, it is meant for applications which come with their own libraries? As opposed to something that depends on an external library, which should just be included in the .dep file? For example when compiling Mplayer, which needs, say faad2 (among many others), one should just put faad2 in the .dep as opposed to including in a .tcel?

[bigpcman]

A .tce and .tcel are the same. the only difference is that a .tcel extension has libraries in it, i.e. .so or .a files. When building an extension with libraries, just name it extension.tcel instead of extension.tce.
The .tcem files are similar, but instead of libraries it is for modules.
There are also .tcelm and .tceml files, which are the same and include both libraries and modules.

The extra characters in the file name extension tell the tce-load app to run ldconfig or depmod. Though it is looking more and more like everything is packaged with a library. Perhaps in the future ldconfig and depmod will be used after every installation?

I was wondering about this as well. Good summary.

Has there been a decision as to where we are headed in the future as it relates to simplifying extension management. Is the goal to have a single extension type that supports all variants or something else?

[robc]

robc, thanks for the clarification. If I understand it right, it is meant for applications which come with their own libraries? As opposed to something that depends on an external library, which should just be included in the .dep file? For example when compiling Mplayer, which needs, say faad2 (among many others), one should just put faad2 in the .dep as opposed to including in a .tcel?

Yes this is correct. The .tcel extension name is only used if there are libraries contained in the extension. Other extensions that contain libraries can be included in a dep file and ldconfig will be used after installation.