This repository is a work in progress, but it demonstrates that it may be possible to build ONLP separately to ONL, and do so for the Ubuntu operating system. It currently uses a staging branch on APS Network's own GitHub (the platform sources are not available on the main ONL repository anyway).
The technique applies as equally to ONLP (v1).
The ONL build system is not terribly well understood, but Mion (NetworkGradeLinux) developed recipes to build it outside of the ordinary ONL build process.1
There are both patches to the core library and to platform specific code. The platform patches are placed in a subdirectory named after the platform name and are applied on this basis in the build script; all of the patches in that directory are applied, regardless of their name.
The ordinary patches are for adding i2c linker options to the build, some
better error logging and pulling in the correct editline library.
The platform patch changes a Makefile variable which isn't well understood, but is required to build.