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

[Jack Mitchell]

On 15/08/12 10:46, Paul Eggleton wrote:
> 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.
>

Do the 'tasks' do anything other than specify meta-data groups? If they 
don't include any glue or additional processes then I strongly agree 
that the name should be changed.

-- 

   Jack Mitchell (jack at embed.me.uk)
   Embedded Systems Engineer
   http://www.embed.me.uk

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