What it is

Wharfie is a modern build system for embedded devices. The concept is very similar to "docker". Both, "docker" and "wharfie", are using a simple format to describe custom linux system configurations and rebuild those easily. Wharfie uses basically the same syntax, while it is not fully compatible.

While "docker" is focusing on scalable web services, "wharfie" is focusing on embedded linux systems.

With "wharfie" one can easily build a root filesystem, based on the Debian distribution from scratch. He can then configure it in an appropriate way.

Legal concerns

When using the linux OS for embeddded systems, a lot of legal issues have to be respected. Luckily wharfie contains two additional commands to face these issues:

• LICENSE <filename></filename>
• SOURCE <filename></filename>

These commands are creating tarballs, containing all the source packages, or all the licenses of your system, which where installed through debian packages. This feature makes it very easy to prepare yourself for distributing such an image.

You will need to be able to provide such packages when you plan to distribute the image as part of a product, as well as when you share it with others in form of a download on the internet. When you publish anything, which contains Code that war released under a third party license, you are forced to provide a list of all those licenses, containing the license text.