[Openembedded-architecture] bblayers.conf - Past, Present and Future?

[Koen Kooi]

> Op 11 mei 2016, om 07:42 heeft Richard Purdie <richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org> het volgende geschreven:
> 
> We currently have a few different ways people setup and build
> combinations of OE layers. Koen's presentation and ELC covers some of
> this, we've also heard representations at OEDEM/OEDAM and I think
> everyone would agree that its worth seeing if there is some way we
> could improve the situation.
> 
> We have various tools/options:
> 
> * TEMPLATECONF
> * combo-layer
> * repo
> * git submodules
> 
> and we all have views, some of them quite strong about different
> elements of these.
> 
> At the end of the day, our users want/need something which sets up the
> system for them to use and "works", they don't really care about the
> details. 
> 
> To summarise the general problem, we need some way of saying "get this
> set of git repositories and check them out in this layout, then setup a
> bblayers.conf file like this”.

When working on angstrom infrastructure most of the time is spent dealing with ‘bad’ layers: Reordering bblayers.conf, adding bbappends, overlay complete recipes or plain forking a layer.
The interaction between layers makes me very hesitant to trust any tool that will automagically generate a bblayers.conf. On the other hand: it would be a big incentive to push harder on maintainers to get their layers fixed. But as we have seen with the xorg config bbappends and its usage of immediate expansion, it may take more than a year to change a single := in all the layer in my bblayers.conf.

I don’t have any good solutions to offer since this is mostly a people problem. Apart from having well behaving layers to copy/pasting is safe to do :)

regards,

Koen