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

[Trevor Woerner]

On Thu 2016-05-12 @ 01:19:21 PM, Flanagan, Elizabeth wrote:
> My worry is the "tested on a regular basis and actively maintained"
> part. Just looking at the layers in the layer-index and wondering how
> many of them are actively working with master makes my stomach knot
> up. Yeah, I would love this tool but only if the meta data behind it
> was functional.

Which leads to another topic that was discussed a fair amount at both the
recent OEDAM as well as the OEDEM back in Dublin. This is especially a problem
with BSP layers. Unfortunately too many of them end up being "pump and dump"s
:-(

There's a sad sort of "first over the line" quality to the layerindex. The
first person who submits a BSP layer for whatever hardware (whether or not
they have that hardware and whether or not they've even tested their layer)
becomes "maintainer for life" and whatever is in layerindex becomes the
de-facto layer for some piece of hardware, even though a better layer might
exist on, say, github.

That's why I'm looking into some sort of mechanism that would allow people to
perform a build on their own hardware and feed some sort of "yea/nay" result
back to layerindex. In other words, the layers would all appear in toaster and
the layerindex, but along with them would be some sort of "here's how many
people built it last week, and here's how successful (or not) they were".
The intent isn't to stop people from using a layer, but just to provide some
sort of feel for its quality.