[OE-core] [PATCH] layer.conf: Bumping LAYERVERSION_core

[Paul Eggleton]

Hi Beth,

On Tuesday 02 July 2013 12:20:00 Flanagan, Elizabeth wrote:
> This goes back to my RFC:
> 
> http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.openembedded.core/39016

Sorry, I meant to reply to that email and didn't get around to it, my 
apologies.

> As we are removing meta-toolchain* and replacing it with bitbake
> <imagename> -c populate_sdk this causes issues with those of us who
> need to do automated builds both on the current development branch and
> on prior development branches.
> 
> Example: For prior releases, I need to build meta-toolchain*. Without
> having a simple way to figure out where this is no longer the case, I
> (and other folks who run automated builds) end up having to jump
> through a lot of hoops trying to figure out where this layer changed.
> Utilizing LAYERVERSION_* to do it makes sense as there is a
> significant change that would cause issues for build engineers. Prior
> to this I was utilizing LCONF, which was the wrong solution, but just
> happened to work in the example I'm thinking of.

I can definitely see this being useful as something you can do a conditional on 
within the autobuilder code; however the original intention was that 
LAYERVERSION would only get bumped on changes that would break other layers 
(being that it was designed to match up with versioned layer dependencies) and 
I'm not sure this is one of those changes.

This situation has come up a lot over the life of this project, and I wonder 
if it's time to look at having something a bit more organised - perhaps part 
of the static configuration of the autobuilder could be within the metadata, 
i.e. just the values needed to specify the right version-specific behaviour? 
For the purposes of the Yocto Project autobuilder we can add the needed 
definitions in the meta-yocto layer rather than needing to modify OE-Core. 
Could that work?

Cheers,
Paul

-- 

Paul Eggleton
Intel Open Source Technology Centre