[Openembedded-architecture] Notes from the OEDAM "Naming Table"

[Behan Webster]

During the latest OEDAM meeting, following ELC2016 in San Diego, a discussion
began regarding Yocto/OE "branding" as well as how confusing it is for newbies
to understand all the terminology. Since this discussion was taking too much
time away from the OEDAM, interested people gathered at lunch to continue the
conversation. What follows is what was discussed at the naming table at OEDAM.

The problem is that the messaging and branding surrounding Yocto/Poky/OE is
confusing for everyone... sometimes even those directly involved in these
projects! Explaining the distinctions between all these terms is convoluted
and confusing. The ultimate users of all these things mostly don't care: they
just want to use "yocto" (whatever that is) and build their product. Most
people still don't understand the differences and just randomly piece together
"Yocto/OE/Poky/distribution/build system/tool" and hope they get it right when
asking questions.

Minimally, explaining that the Yocto Project Release 2.0 (Jethro) is in fact
Poky version 14.0, or that you can get a git version of the Yocto Project by
cloning poky.git is just dizzying.

The technologies in question are powerful, capable and complex, but they
should not be this hard to explain to others! OSVs, for example, not only have
to explain all of this to customers, they also have to explain the
relationship between OE/Yocto and their products. All these things should be
able to be explained in simple language.

Many of the terms (such as "distribution" and "poky" itself) are not only
overloaded, their definitions have changed over time. Also there is a lot of
confusion surrounding the use of "meta-foo" to both refer to the layer name
within a release, or the git repo from which it was originally pulled. Again,
an important distinction, but also something which most people don't care
about nor appreciate.

This discussion was meant to be the start of a conversation (and not yet solve
all these problems). The following agreements, and resulting recommendations
were made.

Agreements:

1) There is a problem with naming/messaging/branding

2) There is minimally a problem with the naming of the git repo and Yocto
Project release

After discussing a number of possible options the following recommendations
were agreed upon:

1) Rename the git repo to "yocto-toolbox.git"
  - The toolbox contains a snapshot of OE-core (and bitbake)
  - The toolbox contains a distribution layer (meta-poky)
  - The toolbox could contain more than one distribution layer
  - The toolbox contains further scripts and tools added by the Yocto Project
  - The toolbox contains documentation for all these things
  - Not all the tools in this toolbox need be used
  - Tools in this tool box could be replaced or omitted by OSVs
  - Further tools could be added by the end-user* or OSV 

* (in this case the end-user are the engineers using a Yocto Project release to
 build something)

2) Rename release tarball to "yocto-toolbox-<version>.tar.xz"
  - This makes it consistent with recommendation #1, and decouples it from the
    Poky release number which is mostly superfluous.
  - Determining the version of poky could easily be provided in a meta-poky
    conf file or by a tool

(Alternatively, instead of "toolbox" we could call it "kitchen" to keep with
the cooking theme. :) )

There are plenty of examples of a project release containing snapshots of
another project:
- Debian includes specific releases of gcc/glibc/bash/etc, but we still call it
 "Debian"
- OpenDaylight contains a release of OpenStack, but we still call it
 “OpenDaylight"

Behan

--
Behan Webster
behanw at converseincode.com





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