[Openembedded-architecture] consolidated configs

[Randy Witt]

On 03/21/2016 12:33 PM, Trevor Woerner wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm curious to know what the best procedure is to propose and carry-out a new
> feature request for OE (or perhaps propose it, discuss, then decide it's not
> necessary)?
>
> I haven't fleshed out all the nuances, but ideally I'd like to be able to give
> someone one file, they would run bitbake on it, and end up with a duplicate of
> my build (which generated that configuration file).
>
> My use-case is CI builds. On one machine I do work on a build but when I want
> to transfer that to my CI there's too many manual steps involved (steps that I
> invariably get wrong). E.g. I don't always remember that in order to fix some
> issue I had to both tweak local.conf and add another layer, so on my CI
> machine I tweak local.conf but forget to add the necessary layer. Or I'll add
> the layer to bblayers.conf but then forget to actually checkout the layer for
> my CI build. I am familiar with the 'repo' tool, but 'repo' knows nothing
> about OE, so it's not a complete solution either. 'repo' might form part of
> the solution, but isn't a solution by itself.
>
> Obviously this doesn't help if my build is based on internal layers or
> private layers and/or commits that only exist on my build machine. But even
> in this case the metadata that my build would generate would be sufficient for
> you (or whatever code we add) to recognize that these objects are not
> available (either by looking at a repository's remote information, or by
> looking at the hash of the HEAD which isn't found in a fresh checkout/fetch).
>
> Apparently others might be interested in this too? Perhaps the toaster people?

I'm definitely interested and it's on my "todo" list. The idea I've mentioned to 
Paul many times is a "build descriptor" that consists of all the items needed to 
describe a build.

Since the descriptor defines a build, as long as it's defined well, you can use 
cli, gui, etc to generate it. But more importantly there can be "plugins" for 
whatever CI/builder you want.

So I would expect that I would use a cli consumer, whereas there could also be 
an autobuilder consumer that reads the descriptor and generates the appropriate 
autobuilder config.

My main desire was to easily be able to use it with the containers I've been 
working on: https://hub.docker.com/r/rewitt/yocto/tags/, so that I could easily 
distribute builds using coreos or something similar.

The desire I have is to separate the "build descriptor" from the generator and 
the backend used to consume it.

> I also think this might help people new to OE, as well as help sort out the
> BSP proliferation issue.
>
> For more information please see:
> 	http://lists.openembedded.org/pipermail/openembedded-core/2016-March/118970.html
>
> Best regards,
> 	Trevor
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