[OE-core] [RFC] let PACKAGES_DYNAMIC be optional ?

[Robert Yang]

On 11/15/2013 09:25 PM, Otavio Salvador wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Richard Purdie
> <richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>> On Fri, 2013-11-15 at 11:31 +0800, Robert Yang wrote:
>>> Currently, the recipe which uses PACKAGES_DYNAMIC usually generates
>>> a lot of packages which costs a lot of time on building the recipe
>>> and do_rootfs, for example, the perl and kernel:
>>>
>>> $ ls tmp/deploy/rpm/armv5te/perl-module-* | wc -l
>>> 621
>>>
>>> $ ls tmp/deploy/rpm/qemux86/kernel-module-* | wc -l
>>> 268
>>>
>>> Also, the eglibc-locale generates more than 300 packages.
>>>
>>> Take perl as an example:
>>>
>>> 1) We generate 621 perl-module-* packages, but the package *perl-modules*
>>>      requires all of them, so once *perl-modules* is installed, all the other
>>>      perl-module-* will be installed and we can't remove any of them since
>>>      perl-modules rdepends on it, if there is a way to package all of these
>>>      perl-module-* into one package (they are about 10MB), it would save a lot
>>>      of time on do_package* and do_rootfs.
>>>
>>> 2) The nativesdk.bbclass can't support PACKAGES_DYNAMIC, for example, it can't
>>>      change the perl-module-app-cpan to nativesdk-perl-module-app-cpan since
>>>      there is no perl-module-app-cpan in PACKAGES when nativesdk.bbclass
>>>      changes the variable's name.
>>>
>>> Can we add a way to let the PACKAGES_DYNAMIC be optional ? for example,
>>>
>>> PACKAGES_DYNAMIC[perl] = "0"
>>>
>>> will disable the perl's PACKAGES_DYNAMIC, and will pack the files as other
>>> recipes do, and of course we need to do some work on the recipe.
>>
>> Before we consider doing this, I'd actually like to see real numbers
>> about how big this problem is.
>>
>> Why? Speaking as someone who has looked specifically at perl and the
>> kernel, I don't believe there is a huge amount of time spent dealing
>> with the individual packages and that maintaining two build paths is
>> actually worse than they minimal performance impact this has.
>>
>> In particular, I'd note that the locale generation happens in parallel
>> with other parts of the build and is not a significant factor in overall
>> build times.
>>
>> The time would be better spent reducing the size of the kernel source
>> installed into the sysroot for example (Bruce is planning action on
>> this).
>
> I agree on Richard on this; keeping too many different build routes
> introduces more test burden and it's only worth if the gain is huge.
>

Sounds reasonable, I will try sooner to see the gain.

// Robert