[Openembedded-architecture] patchwork (etc) support for BSP layers (OEDAM 2017)

[Paul Eggleton]

Hi Trevor / all,

On Tuesday, 7 March 2017 12:59:53 PM NZDT Trevor Woerner wrote:
> On Mon 2017-03-06 @ 09:03:32 AM, akuster808 wrote:
> > On 03/05/2017 09:43 PM, Trevor Woerner wrote:
> > > One of the items discussed over lunch at the recent OEDAM 2017, but that
> > > I
> > > can't find in the notes, was about including support for more layers in
> > > patchwork.
> > 
> > I believe this was in the context of the sub layers in meta-openembedded.
> > OE ( community)  could be driving that work, changes etc.
> 
> Funny... I remember it the other way around.
> 
> _I_ brought up this topic in the context of meta-rockchip and it was almost
> immediately subverted by everyone wanting to talk about Tim Orling's
> meta-openembedded split up work ...and here we are again :-(
> 
> So, ignoring Tim's work for the time-being, would it be possible for
> "non-core" layers (maybe the layers found in the layer index?) to be added
> to patchwork (and possibly benefit from other available Yocto tooling)?
> 
> When I brought this up RP immediately questioned whether BSP layers should
> be hosted on git.yoctoproject.org. Then there was talk about financial
> contributions. Then someone suggested the Raspberry Pi foundation might
> want to fund some of this infrastructure for meta-raspberrypi. Then we
> drifted into the meta-openembedded split-up (and everyone forgot the
> previous 10 minutes).
> :-)

I wasn't present for the meeting, so I can't speak to what was discussed other 
than what I've read in the minutes.

Leaving that aside, I don't think there's any impediment that I know of per se  
to additional layers getting added to patchwork, and beyond the initial setup 
it shouldn't present much of a burden to be accounted for. meta-freescale is 
already there as an example.

However, what might be tricky is if that layer currently accepts patches via a 
mailing list that also takes patches for other layers; meta-rockchip would 
fall into this category given that it shares the yocto at yoctoproject.org 
mailing list with several other layers. I'm unsure as to whether patchwork 
supports filtering on subject or similar - at the moment the patchwork project 
entry to mailing list relationship is 1:1. Jose, can you check on that?

Another useful piece of infrastructure would be the recipe reporting system at 
http://recipes.yoctoproject.org , whose major function is to provide a view to 
how well we're tracking upstream with regard to recipe upgrades. It's not 
currently set up to scale to multiple layers unfortunately. FYI it's a fork of 
the layer index code (something that I regret, but it was started as an intern 
project without much time available). However, long term I'd like to see the 
recipe reporting functionality reintegrated back into the layer index so that 
layer maintainers that wish to take advantage of it could simply enable it. 
That would need some design work, and there may have to be some external 
process gathering and populating the data though as that can be resource-
consuming, however if we make that relatively easy to set up that shouldn't 
present too much of a problem. At the moment AFAIK nobody is working on this 
though, so volunteers would be welcome.

Cheers,
Paul

-- 

Paul Eggleton
Intel Open Source Technology Centre