[OE-core] [Openembedded-architecture] RFC BuildAppliance future

[Khem Raj]

On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 10:04 AM, Brian Avery <avery.brian at gmail.com> wrote:
>   Please note, this is going out to 3 lists in an attempt to insure that no
> one who would be impacted by this change misses it. Implied spam apology
> included.
>
>   The Yocto Project currently provides a virtual machine image called the
> Build Appliance
> (https://downloads.yoctoproject.org/releases/yocto/yocto-2.2/build-appliance/).
> This image can be run using either VirtualBox or VMware. It enables you to
> build and boot a custom embedded Linux image with the Yocto Project on a
> non-Linux development system.  It is not intended for day to day development
> use, but instead, is intended to allow users to “try out” the tools even if
> they do not have access to a Linux system.
>
>   We are considering replacing the VM based Build Appliance with a set of
> containers (https://hub.docker.com/r/crops/poky/, or if you want a user
> interface (https://hub.docker.com/r/crops/toaster-master/ ).  These
> containers currently provide most of the functionality of the Build
> Appliance and should shortly be at feature parity with the Build Appliance.
> We are actively adding to and supporting the containers as some of our
> developers are using them in their day to day development in order to
> benefit from the host isolation and ease with which other distributions can
> be tested.
>
>   This is an RFC to see what features in the Build Appliance are important
> to you but would not be provided by the container solutions.  If the
> community would be just as content using the container approach as using the
> VM based Build Appliance image, then we’d be better off deprecating the
> Build Appliance and applying those resources elsewhere.  If there are
> important features the Build Appliance provides which the container solution
> does not, or cannot provide, we’d love to hear what they are!

Personally, I dont use build appliance but I think using containers is a good
step forward, provided, we can address all build host OSes that
virtual appliance
could.

Build appliance is also a sort of "eat your own dog-food" for ensuring that we
are doing ok on preparing cloud images for deployment. Hopefully we wont
lose that testing, may be we can add another image to cover that.

>
>
Thanks in advance for any feedback,
>
> -Brian
>
> an Intel Employee
>
>
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