[OE-core] [RFC][PATCH 0/6] development vs. production builds

[Mike Looijmans]

This seems to assume that every project is similar and that develop vs 
production is something well defined. Well, it's not.

I for one would welcome the demise of debug-tweaks. It's an option that 
enforces one of two policies that may both be wrong.

For example, if the target is a settop box where users tend to port-forward 
the SSH port to the internet, and which is open so that they're expected to 
log in and make changes, the policy we want is that there is initially no root 
password, and that SSH access requires a valid password. This makes the system 
secure against outside attacks. Setting debug-tweaks will allow blank SSH 
passwords, while not setting it would invalidate the root login. Neither is 
acceptable for this project, so one has to resort to overriding the image 
class methods zap_root_password and ssh_allow_empty_password to do nothing.

Instead of some obscure switch with implications hidden somewhere in various 
recipes, classes, distros and local configs, can't we just define options that 
actually do what they say, like for example a boolean option 
"ssh_allow_empty_password"?

While the "development/production" switch may be great for some projects, 
it'll make things only more complicated for others while gaining nothing above 
what we have now.



On 15-05-17 15:26, Patrick Ohly wrote:
> At OEDAM [1] I took the AR to flesh out some of my ideas for
> introducing global and per-image settings for switching between
> development and production builds. The goal is partly to establish
> common configure options that then can be used by different layers,
> partly to have some actual useful functionality attached to them
> already in OE-core.
>
> "development" builds are what a developer does when trying out a
> distro or working on his own personal device. "production" is what
> device manufacturer put onto the actual end-user hardware.
>
> At OEDAM we already concluded that per-image settings are more
> useful. However, sometimes a component also has compile-time choices
> that cannot be changed later on in an image, and indeed I found one
> example for that (kmod) in OE-core.
>
> Therefore I have included "debug-build" DISTRO_FEATURES support. It's a
> bit similar to manpages.bbclass, but in contrast to that (currently)
> is meant to be inherited globally - that's partly due to
> misunderstanding how manpages.bbclass was meant to be used. This can
> be changed, for now I just want to demonstrate that such a distro
> feature is not entirely useless, and what effect it could have already
> in OE-core.
>
> In refkit, we also switch globally between development and production
> builds via .inc files. However, I am in the process of replacing that
> with the more flexible per-image IMAGE_MODE check. So from my
> perspective, the IMAGE_MODE is more important and useful than the
> "debug-build" DISTRO_FEATURE.
>
> From a design perspective, the approach taken here is to let a
> developer or image define what mode it wants, and default features can
> be configured accordingly. That alternative would be to continue defining
> features as before and use the mode to configure QA warnings or errors.
>
> But I find that less flexible, and I suspect it would be harder to
> keep track of what is meant to be usable in which mode. Developers
> also would have a harder time overriding the defaults.
>
> [1] https://www.openembedded.org/wiki/OEDAM_2017
>
> Patrick Ohly (6):
>   build-mode.bbclass: distro-wide debug-build mode
>   basefiles: warn about non-production DISTRO_FEATURES in motd
>   defaultsetup.conf: enable special "debug-build" DISTRO_FEATURES support
>   image-mode.bbclass: per-image production/development/debug mode
>   image.bbclass: include IMAGE_MODE support
>   local.conf.sample: make debug-tweaks depend on IMAGE_MODE
>
>  meta/classes/build-mode.bbclass                   | 16 ++++-
>  meta/classes/image-mode.bbclass                   | 62 ++++++++++++++++-
>  meta/classes/image.bbclass                        |  3 +-
>  meta/conf/distro/defaultsetup.conf                |  2 +-
>  meta/conf/local.conf.sample                       |  5 +-
>  meta/recipes-core/base-files/base-files_3.0.14.bb | 11 +++-
>  6 files changed, 96 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
>  create mode 100644 meta/classes/build-mode.bbclass
>  create mode 100644 meta/classes/image-mode.bbclass
>
> base-commit: 9f9ebf2e1ba6eda48fb5e3f20d4ca5bbabe3dad4
>



Kind regards,

Mike Looijmans
System Expert

TOPIC Products
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Telefoon: +31 (0) 499 33 69 79
E-mail: mike.looijmans at topicproducts.com
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