[OE-core] RFC: Layer tooling brainstorming

[Chris Larson]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 6:59 AM, Paul Eggleton
<paul.eggleton at linux.intel.com> wrote:
> * Show easily which recipes are being used and which are overridden. We have
> bitbake-layers, but this clearly needs some extension. I think long term we
> would want to be able to analyse overrides accross a set of layers to figure
> out where common stuff in non-core layers needs pushing up to oe-core.

I think we'll definitely need multiple views into the information.

> * Allow layer maintainers to easily pull a version of a recipe into their own
> layer if it's about to be removed from oe-core - with some complicated recipes
> that could be painful/annoying to pick out all the necessary files by hand.

The newcollection class in OE does this.  It's not perfect, but it
gets you 90% of the way there.  I was thinking it may be useful as a
separate script, indeed.

> * Recipe maintenance tools that take advantage of bitbake's parsing logic to
> aid blanket updates (e.g. variable renames). This should help mitigate the
> increased difficulty of having recipes spread out over multiple repositories
> when doing these kinds of updates.

This is non-trivial, but doable given zecke's ast implementation.  I
expect we need an API function in the parse package to parse a
string/file and hand back the AST nodes, which we could then
manipulate, and write code to generate the file back out of the ast.
-- 
Christopher Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Senior Software Engineer, Mentor Graphics