Re: Yocto Project and OE - Where now?

[Khem Raj <raj.khem@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Tom Rini <tom_rini@mentor.com> wrote:
> On 01/18/2011 01:12 PM, Koen Kooi wrote:
>>
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>> On 18-01-11 17:54, Tom Rini wrote:
>>>
>>> On 01/18/2011 01:05 AM, Otavio Salvador wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 05:21, Graeme Gregory<dp@xora.org.uk>   wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On 17/01/2011 19:01, Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> - where possible stick to one recipe per package. This reduces the
>>>>>> maintenance work and reduces the QA nightmare of lots of different
>>>>>> permutations.
>>>>>> I feel one recipe per package should be the common case for
>>>>>> applications, and preferably also for libs (although I am well aware
>>>>>> that especially in the latter case multiple versions cannot always be
>>>>>> avoided).
>>>>>
>>>>> OE is not a distro so this is a non starter already, please don't bog
>>>>> down this discussion by re-opening this again. Angstrom 2008, Angstrom
>>>>> 2010, kaelios and slugos are all released distributions with different
>>>>> versions of apps just as a starter and they arent even near the total
>>>>> number of distros in OE.
>>>>
>>>> I disagree. I think having too many versions of a package just makes
>>>> difficult to get things done:
>>>>
>>>>   - it increases the amount of maintainence work;
>>>>   - has a bigger time to get bugs spoted;
>>>>
>>>> Users of old distros ought to use a specific repository and branch.
>>>> Master ought to be kept clean for 'next distro release'.
>>>
>>> I agree, at least going forward.  We must make it easier for
>>> distributions to say "here is my 'stable' release" and "here is my
>>> development release".
>>>
>>> First, I'm not picking on Angstrom here, really, I swear.  It's just a
>>> good example.
>>>
>>> But we also don't want to be unreasonable or unbending here.  We'll have
>>> to have multiple udevs (due to having different kernel versions as some
>>> HW isn't on the latest and greatest).  And if DistroA says they really
>>> want to stick to busybox 1.17.4 for a while, we should let that happen
>>> too.  But I don't think we want to have to carry on the recipes that
>>> angstrom-2008.1 wants and angstrom-2010.x wants and angstrom-2011.x
>>> wants and angstrom-2012.x want into 2013, in master.
>>
>> And noone says you should. At some point 2010.x works well enough to
>> force 2008.1 into hiding and start 201Y.x. The current situation where
>> the "unstable" 2010.x ended up in a product is largely due to the gcc
>> people breaking the NEON intrinsics interface API in between 4.3 and 4.5.
>
> ick, I didn't know about that...
>
>>> For example, at some point we want to switch to libtool 2.4 only.  And
>>> that would certainly be a headache for angstrom-2008.1 (but we're glad,
>>> really! for angstrom-2010.x using 2.4 and testing and fixing things). So
>>> wouldn't it be a good thing to be able to say that if you want
>>> angstrom-2008.1 you do ... this ... and get the layers that give a good
>>> stable 2008.1, based on whatever policy Angstrom wants for doing updates?
>>
>> In the past the angstrom people created a stable branch and supported
>> that for a given release. The same can be done in the layering script,
>> where it would just lock down to certain revisions of various layers.
>
> So, I think we agree.  Distros should be saying "if you want our stable
> release you should be over here..." and if you want our development WIP, you
> should be over here.
>
>> But in the end if boils down to "Does OE wants to make life hard for
>> DISTROs or easy". Frans is firmly in the "make it hard" camp, I hope
>> others have a saner point of view.
>>
>> If you're forcing 90% of your users to put e.g. udev_162.bb in their
>> layer you're doing it wrong. But you're also doing it wrong if you have
>> 20 udev recipes :)
>
> I think we also agree here.  But what's the rule of thumb(s) we want to
> have, to provide enough choice without too much headache?  As I said
> elsewhere, .inc files should probably be used a whole lot more, to help with
> the problem of recipe bugfixing and N recipes for an app with the problem.
>  We should probably also say that in addition to the "keep the last GPLv2+
> version around" rule of thumb we should also have a "keep the latest stable
> release" around too.  But what else?  To use busybox as an example, do we
> really need to keep 1.18.0 and 1.18.1 around when we have 1.18.2?  How about
> if we make the delta between the 3 be just the SRC_URI + checksums?


Well what to keep around can not be generalized so much. It also
depends upon the nature of releases for various packages
some packages have a major release and then push out bug fix releases
like busy box case you sited but there are packages
which only do major releases which can cause compatibility hassles as
new interfaces come and old ones are removed etc.
so I think it has to be flexible and mostly left to package
maintainers discretion as they know the nature of releases most but
I like the idea of keeping one GPLv2 release around and 1 latest
release around. If a distro pinned a version then that should
be considered as well. It is bad to sweep underneath a distros
pinnings. Then they have to rebuild and they get problems
as they have to make sure that if a package bump happens then they
should be able to define an upgrade path

Sometimes newer is not always better in case of udev the size has
increased over the time and some distro's may not like
it and there can be many such scenarios.

>
> --
> Tom Rini
> Mentor Graphics Corporation
>
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