[OE-core] CORE_IMAGE_EXTRA_INSTALL has potential to be misleading?

[Paul Eggleton]

On Wednesday 20 June 2012 14:28:40 Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   was reminded of this as i was perusing some old OE core notes.
> remember this from core-image.bbclass?
> 
> CORE_IMAGE_BASE_INSTALL = '\
>     task-core-boot \
>     task-base-extended \
>     \
>     ${CORE_IMAGE_EXTRA_INSTALL} \
>     '
> 
> CORE_IMAGE_EXTRA_INSTALL ?= ""
> 
> IMAGE_INSTALL ?= "${CORE_IMAGE_BASE_INSTALL}"
> 
>   except there are some core image variation recipes
> (core-image-minimal-dev.bb, among others) that do things like this:
> 
> IMAGE_INSTALL = "task-core-boot ${ROOTFS_PKGMANAGE}"
> 
> IMAGE_FEATURES += "dev-pkgs"
> 
> IMAGE_LINGUAS = " "
> 
> LICENSE = "MIT"
> 
> inherit core-image
> 
>   note how the explicit assignment to IMAGE_INSTALL in that second
> example will copletely override the "IMAGE_INSTALL ?=" in the bbclass
> file, at which point ${CORE_IMAGE_EXTRA_INSTALL} will obviously never
> be evaluated and included.

Right, this is not really ideal. In the case of core-image-minimal(-dev) we're 
trying to be as minimal as reasonably possible, and that includes eliminating 
a bunch of the stuff that core-image.bbclass adds. The easiest way to do this 
is by simply setting IMAGE_INSTALL explicitly.

It seems like core-image-minimal-dev has been a little neglected - at least 
two changes that went into core-image-minimal were not also applied to it, 
including the addition of CORE_IMAGE_EXTRA_INSTALL (or POKY_EXTRA_INSTALL as 
it was known at the time). I'm wondering if a better way for this specific 
recipe to work would just to be to "require core-image-minimal.bb" and then 
set IMAGE_FEATURES += "dev-pkgs" as appropriate.

core-image-minimal* are somewhat special cases, however I do think we do need 
to improve the consistency of all of our image recipes.

Cheers,
Paul

-- 

Paul Eggleton
Intel Open Source Technology Centre