[Openembedded-architecture] Yocto support for Centos-7 (RHEL-7): drop in early 2020?

Adrian Bunk bunk at stusta.de
Thu Dec 12 03:38:18 UTC 2019


On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 06:31:30PM -0800, Andre McCurdy wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 5:13 PM Denys Dmytriyenko <denis at denix.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 01:30:30PM -0500, Philip Balister wrote:
> > >
> > > From my point of view, the people that need CentOS 7 support need to
> > > step up and do the work. The project can't allocate critical development
> > > resources to support older distros.
> >
> > I agree with Philip here - we should not be spending already scarce
> > engineering resources trying to shoehorn CentOS 7 support in.
> 
> We already spend scarce engineering resources on stuff like (just as
> an example) gcc for the target, which is a far more "niche" use case
> than CentOS 7 support.

It does matter a lot how the resulting work is distributed.

There is no need to question whether niche features like gcc or GNOME 
for the target is a useful way of spending resources since the work is 
done by the people interested in the feature.

Niche features like CentOS 7 support or musl place a burden on everyone 
contributing to OE, since these are common cases where completely 
unrelated contributions require extra work.

In some cases this even creates new bugs for everyone else,
like the breakage caused by an incorrect CentOS 7 workaround in nettle 
that needed a last-minute fixup before the release of Yocto 2.7.

> You could also ask the question why do we have scarce engineering
> resources? One factor is that OE is not user friendly and putting up
> more barriers (ie stricter requirements on the host OS) isn't going to
> help with that. Effort spent to increase the chances that OE "just
> works" by automatically providing more of its dependencies and relying
> less on the host may be a good investment in terms of alienating less
> users, who may then persevere long enough to eventually become
> contributors.

The problem is not lack of users, the problem is converting existing
users into upstream contributors.

Effort spent on getting more users is wasted effort if the goal is to 
improve the scarce engineering resources.

And existing contributors might stop contributing when a large part of 
the contributing effort ends up having to be spent on niche features
without interest to the contributor.

cu
Adrian


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