BuildStream is a tool for building / integrating software stacks. In a way, it has a similar goal to bitbake / yocto and Android repo, but takes a completely different approach. It can be used to take software from various sources, build it with various buildsystems in a reproducible sandbox, and cache results for speedy rebuilds.

In this talk I give a brief overview of Buildstream, how it is used to build GNOME OS, and the challenges we face in using it. I also go over freedesktop-sdk which is a base runtime that can be used as a base to build your own system.

I also discuss the challenges we encountered with using buildstream with ostree and the steps we're taking to support updating with systemd-sysupdate.