[OE-core] RFC: OE-Core task rework

[Paul Eggleton]

Hi all,

There have been a few requests to review the task recipes (i.e. package 
groups) provided by OE-Core, and indeed these have not really been looked at 
seriously since OE-Core was created. Ideally I think we want them to be useful 
to a wide audience and provide useful units of functionality that can be added 
to an image without the person doing the selection having to manually select 
too many individual packages. Imagine presenting the list of tasks to someone 
in a UI for assembling images (such as Hob or Narcissus) and you can start to 
see that we have some work to do in this area.

I know various distros and users of OE-Core have created their own tasks or 
resurrected tasks from OE-Classic, and this is an opportunity to perhaps look 
at bringing some of these (or at least, parts of them) into the core. It is 
true that tasks will often be an expression of distro policy, and we also 
can't have any tasks in OE-Core that refer to packages that don't exist in OE-
Core; thus distros will always be extending the base tasks or adding their own 
- and that's fine. However, with some thought I believe we can come up with a 
set of tasks that are generally useful to most people using OE-Core.

For reference, I've compiled a list on the wiki of the current tasks in OE-
Core with links to the recipes and some notes:

  http://www.openembedded.org/wiki/OE-Core_Task_Rework

Some of the things I think we ought to consider/address as part of this 
exercise:

1) Do we rename "task" to something a little more understandable to the 
uninitiated, such as "package group"? The word "task" is already used in a 
much more natural sense within bitbake as a unit of work. Historically I 
believe we picked up this term from Debian but I'm not aware of significant use 
by other mainstream distributions.

2) Look at the existing tasks and:
 * evaluate their usefulness
 * remove any that are obsolete
 * adjust existing contents if needed
 * look for useful groups of packages that might be added

 We need to pay particular attention to task-core-boot and task-base as these 
are pulled in by default in any image that inherits from core-image.bbclass - 
if these are not generally working for people that are creating their own 
images, we need to change them such that they are.

3) Ensure all task recipes follow reasonable patterns:
 *  Fix recipe DESCRIPTIONs to make sense (and not contain Poky references)
 *  Ensure all individual packages have a decent SUMMARY/DESCRIPTION
 *  Try to make each task have a reasonable name - there are some current uses 
of "core" and "base" that don't actually convey any meaning; LSB specific tasks 
should be named as such, etc.
 *  Make all tasks inherit task.bbclass so that they get proper dbg/dev 
packages and any other common task functionality

4) Consider the usefulness of the existing PACKAGE_GROUP_ structure which 
converts some IMAGE_FEATURES into the addition of tasks to be installed (see 
classes/core-image.bbclass). At the very least we should probably rename this 
if we rename tasks to package groups, and there's a question as to how 
IMAGE_FEATURES scales - should every task be represented in there or only a 
select list? Would we be better off not trying to bring any tasks in via 
IMAGE_FEATURES at all and mostly leave that to control post-processing (e.g. 
package-management, debug-tweaks, etc.)?

Please reply with your thoughts. Once we've come to a consensus on the things 
we want to do (allowing plenty of time for discussion), I'll look at putting 
together a set of patches that makes the appropriate changes.

Thanks,
Paul

-- 

Paul Eggleton
Intel Open Source Technology Centre