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

Fri Sep 2 18:44:17 UTC 2016

On 2016-08-30 02:56 PM, Richard Purdie wrote:
> On Tue, 2016-08-30 at 16:34 -0500, Sean Hudson wrote:
>>    This topic does come up frequently and I would really like to see
>> resolved as well.  As you may recall, I was one of the participants
>> in
>> the discussion over lunch, so, I agree with all of the
>> recommendations. :)
>>
>>    It seems to me that the renaming of the poky git repo and the
>> delivery
>> tarball fall squarely on Richard's and other YP maintainers'
>> shoulders.
>> However, the convention of naming layers, meta-xyz, may fall
>> somewhere
>> in between the two projects.
>>
>>    So, Richard, what are your thoughts?
> To be honest I'm more than slightly frustrated with this discussion.
> There are reasons why we've ended up where we are now, and there are
> some downsides to various aspects of this which I've not been given any
> opportunity to discuss. I wasn't included in the "naming table"
> discussion,
It was done locally over lunch. It would have been good to have you 
there in person at the "naming table". But the reason it was done with a 
smaller group offline was purely because not everyone present at the 
meeting wanted to discuss it. The offline discussion was to come up with 
some ideas and then post them for all to see and discuss.

I apologize that this caused frustration. Please believe me that this 
was not the intention.

(Incidentally the "naming table" was more of a place where I was 
banished with all those people interested in the topic so that the 
others could have a quiet lunch.) ;)

>   and when I did try to respond to some things, I've just
> been told to effectively shut up as my input wasn't welcome or wanted.
Actually what we said at OEADM was that the notes would be written up 
and posted, and then we can all discuss them. Rehashing the whole 
discussion during OEDAM without first seeing the meeting notes basically 
would have meant having the whole discussion all over again precluding 
all the other things which needed to be discussed in that meeting.

Your input is being asked for now, and indeed is appreciated. The 
intention was always to involve you.

> I'd mention the following:
>
> a) I am well aware that some people struggle with the naming.
Sadly, it's not only "some people". The vast majority of people are 
struggling. I've had to explain this to countless people, and it is painful.

During the YP devday we had in Fremont we had a "meet the developers" 
kind of open mic session. It ended up primary as everyone present 
complaining about the naming issue to the 5 poor souls at the front of 
the room (all OE and YP contributors and I believe all people subscribed 
to this mailing list).

I can't stress enough that this is not a small issue. It is probably the 
most frustrating non-technical thing people complain to me about using YP.

> b) Its not possible to please everyone. Everyone has some pet hate and
> they're all different. There is no perfect solution.
True. However saying there is "no perfect solution" doesn't preclude 
change which makes it less terrible.

There is indeed room for improvement.

Personally I try to follow the path of "least surprise" with these kinds 
of things. The fewer the WTF moments, the better the solution. For the 
current situation, the WTF count is higher than it needs to be.

> c) Different components do need different names. If we call everything
> "fish", nobody knows what you're talking about any more. So different
> names are good. It can't all be "Yocto Project" or "OpenEmbedded" or
> "Bitbake", they all refer to different very specific things.
The naming that is being talked about is the "poky" part, specifically 
the git repo and release tarball.

Nobody is suggesting the renaming of Yocto, OE or bitbake.

> d) We could and IMO should relax a bit about some of the incorrect
> usages. You don't need to correct every misuse of a term, you can
> generally understand what people are talking about and people do
> naturally end up learning the correct definitions over time, much like
> most other natural language development in a new field.
I agree that one doesn't have to correct the wording of someone's 
question before answering it.

However if terms are regularly being misused (as they are) it points to 
the very problem that started this email thread: that there is a lot of 
confusion surrounding naming.

> e) I don't think we need to present new users with this complete
> confusing glossary and explanations. I think some things should be
> mentioned but they don't need the gory details. There are some things
> you're telling people which shouldn't even exist any more.
Which things shouldn't be mentioned anymore? Please elaborate.

> Following on from e), if I'd been part of this discussion, you'd know
> that I've been trying to kill the poky version number for a while and
> it should be well and truly dead by now.
Excellent! That is great to hear.

>   If its not, I will try and
> further help eradicate it, just point me at where its still being used.
https://www.yoctoproject.org/downloads

All the YP releases are released as tarballs labeled with poky release 
numbers instead of the YP release number.

YP Core - Krogoth 2.1.1  -> poky-krogoth-15.0.1.tar.bz2

The idea with release codenames is that typically they are used prior to 
an actual version number being chosen. But instead of using the YP 
release number, we label the tarball with the codename, and the poky 
version number?

On a separate, but related note, we also then suggest that people clone 
YP 2.1.1 from git using the codename "krogoth", instead of the YP 
release number.

> So there are some things I agree with, there are also other things I
> don't.
Great! This was meant as nothing more than getting the ball rolling and 
starting a proper conversation before OEDEM.

>   I do think there are some simple things we can continue to do
> which would help a lot, including some simple changes to the YP website
> which I'm struggling to get anyone to take notice of or implement :/.
It sounds to me that we all have the same goal of making things clearer.

Behan

-- 
Behan Webster
behanw at converseincode.com