[OE-core] design question: should layer.conf contain "PREFERRED_VERSION" settings?

[Bruce Ashfield]

On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 8:24 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca>
wrote:

>
>   proper attributions seem to have been totally lost here ...
>
> On Wed, 22 Mar 2017, Bruce Ashfield wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 8:02 AM, Burton, Ross <ross.burton at intel.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >       On 22 March 2017 at 11:57, Bruce Ashfield <
> bruce.ashfield at gmail.com> wrote:
> >             So where are they supposed to be specified ? Surely not a
> separate distro .conf ? and most
> > certainly not in local.conf ... I've always been unsure of where the
> right place to specify
> > versions like that.
> >
> > If it were my layer I'd have an .inc file that set all the preferred
> > versions where the defaults don't work, that the user would have to
> > include in their distro.
> >
> > Aha. Kind of like the old versions file that used to float around.
> >
> > Seems reasonable (if a bit less automatic than someone like me who
> > wants .. to use the layer like a black box)
> >
> > Luckily I have push access to that layer, so I can make a change
> > like that ;)
> >
> > One final question, is it considered a design option to set those
> > versions triggered off an IMAGE or DISTRO feature ? i.e. in
> > anonymous python .. or is that already too late in the
> > parsing/resolution process ?
> >
> > Bruce
>
>   sorry, didn't mean to start something this early in the morning ...
> ok, i did. :-)
>
>   in any event, can we agree that:
>
> 1) it's bad layer design if the simple act of including a layer in
> bblayers.conf suddenly causes weird things to happen like the above?
>
> 2) regardless of how the developer eventually does it, picking up
> those PREFERRED VERSIONS from meta-openstack should require *some*
> kind of explicit selection?
>


Honestly .. I disagree on #2.

The packages within the openstack layer *will not work* with other versions
of those
packages.

So if someone actually wants to use the functionality provided by the
layer, they are
not optional. And the errors/issues that you get are extremely obtuse and
hard to
debug. That's the design point of the layer .. it doesn't let that happen.

Hence making it something they must do as an extra step .. really is a bad
idea.

It gets in the way of people picking packages out of that layer if they
don't want to
actually build openstack, that's the crux of the problem. But to answer
that issue,
that's why meta-cloud-services exists, that doesn't' force versions and
holds the
generally useful "cloud" packages.

Cheers,

Bruce


>
>   thank you kindly.
>
> rday
>
> --
>
> ========================================================================
> Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
>                         http://crashcourse.ca
>
> Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
> LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
> ========================================================================
>



-- 
"Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee
at its end"
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