[OE-core] Adding a "tiny" DISTRO_FEATURE and having packages build smaller

[Daniel F. Dickinson]

On 01/02/18 08:54 AM, Burton, Ross wrote:
> On 1 February 2018 at 13:44, Daniel F. Dickinson <cshored at thecshore.com 
> <mailto:cshored at thecshore.com>> wrote:
> 
>     I guess the question is would it be useful to have a flag that chooses
>     a 'typical' tinyness but can be overridden (I'm think here of
>     avoiding having to specify huge numbers of PACKAGECONFIGs for a
>     typical tiny case, when really you want most of the 'normal'
>     tinyness with some
>     tweaks.  What I'm think is that "tiny" really should just change the
>     defaults for PACKAGECONFIG etc, but like the defaults can be easily
>     overridden.
> 
> 
> Well in the idiomatic way the default would be "all the things are on", 
> so doing a "tiny" build would be just setting PACKAGECONFIG="".
> 
> When we're dealing with tiny configurations you can't really say "and 
> this is what people will want", because that's precisely the problem: 
> you don't know what someone else will want.
> 
> Ross
> 
Fair enough.  Is there a way to distribute a set of package configs 
and/or package selections (can a packagegroup do packageconfig or does 
that need to be specified in a different scope (I'm still getting used 
to openembedded)).  "tiny" is a bad choice because it's too generic, but 
perhaps "meta-tiny-router" "meta-tiny-switch" "meta-tiny-home-device" 
etc would make sense as mini-layers that could take care of sane 
defaults for different use cases (assuming the work of splitting 
packages up more and appropriate tinification PACKAGECONFIGs are either 
submitted to the appropriate layer or bbappended in various layers)?

Regards,

Daniel