[Openembedded-architecture] Layer compatibility markup proposal

[Philip Balister]

On 06/02/2017 01:07 PM, Denys Dmytriyenko wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 02, 2017 at 12:51:14PM -0400, Philip Balister wrote:
>> On 06/02/2017 11:19 AM, Randy MacLeod wrote:
>>> On 2017-06-02 10:05 AM, Burton, Ross wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 2 June 2017 at 14:49, Richard Purdie
>>>> <richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org
>>>> <mailto:richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>     Any thoughts on this?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes yes yes yes.
>>>>
>>>> (yes)
>>>>
>>>> Ross
>>>>
>>>> PS yes
>>>
>>> Maybe, err I mean YES!
>>> This would help new users.
>>
>> I'm going to derail the conversation a bit ....
>>
>> So this gives us a way to flag to users that they are working with a
>> likely bad combination of layers. This is a good thing.
>>
>> But, how do we explain how to fix the situation?
>>
>> We can explain how to add the lines so the layer tries to build, but if
>> it fails what then? Ask what recipes the user is looking for and copy to
>> another layer? This would make sense for poorly designed layers, but in
>> many cases, the problem we need to solve is supporting layer maintainers
>> better.
>>
>> As adoption of OpenEmbedded has exploded, it led to a dramatically
>> increases workload across the entire project. Beyond just the core
>> layers. This leads to maintainers being overwhelmed by requests for help
>> with something they published, and then seeing people back off as they
>> get overwhelmed by demand for support for something they put together to
>> support a specific project.
>>
>> I am really interested in the question of how we build up the project,
>> preferably without dividing into pieces as part of the process.
> 
> Nicely put, Philip!
> 
> I agree that part of the issue is with the recent influx of new users 
> demanding support for their own use cases, which might not have been 
> planned out or even implemented by maintainers. Many maintainers are 
> still driven by their own needs first. So, erroring out may help with 
> spotting any incompatibility issues early on, but won't help much with 
> fixing those... Right?
> 

And to be clear, an error that says this hasn't been validated is better
than your typical confusing message when layers are not version matched.

Philip