[OE-core] [devtool][PATCH] devtool deploy-target: optionally specify package

[Trevor Woerner]

Hi Andre, thanks for taking an interest!

On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 6:22 PM, Andre McCurdy <armccurdy at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 1:06 PM, Trevor Woerner <twoerner at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Instead of installing an entire recipe's build output (i.e. ${D}), allow
> the
> > user to optionally specify a package from said recipe to be installed
> > exclusively (i.e. ${PKGDEST}/<package>).
>
> I'm not a big devtool user myself, but I'm curious about the
> situations where you might need this?
>

Earlier today I was working on recipes for some software which recently
added the feature to dlopen() one of a couple shared objects based on
various conditions. But instead of dlopen()'ing the SONAME, they were
dlopen()'ing the raw .so file. OE's default packaging, of course, added the
*.so.0 and *.so.0.0.0 files to the ${PN} package, and the raw *.so files to
the ${PN}-dev package. So when the app tried to run, it failed.

Investigating, I realised there were two things I could do: 1) add the raw
*.so files to the ${PN} package (with INSANE_SKIP += "dev-so") or 2) fix
the app. I decided to try #2, with the help of devtool.

I made one small change to the app, "devtool deploy-target"'ed it, and,
AMAZINGLY, everything worked!! Wow, what luck! ... or not.

Investigating, I discovered that "devtool deploy-target"'s only mode of
operation is to upload the entire recipe's ${D} directory (i.e.
${WORKDIR}/image) to the target! I hope you'll be as surprised by that as
am I. Considering ${D} includes *.a files, man pages, raw *.so files,
pkgconfigs, (... thankfully it doesn't also include the -dbg packages) that
is a lot of stuff to be uploading to the target, a lot of wrong stuff, and
in my case that hindered my work. Most target filesystems are only 10%
larger than required to hold their contents, so uploading static libraries,
man pages, pkgconfigs, etc is not great.

Specifically, these unwanted raw *.so files were hindering my work. My only
two options were: 1) to use "devtool deploy-target" as-is and then have to
manually delete all the .so files or 2) come up with a better solution. I
went with #2 (again).

Many recipes generate just a couple packages: ${PN}, -dbg, -doc, -dev,
-staticdev, -locale. But some generate a whole bunch. In my case my recipe
is generating a lot of packages, but I only wanted to investigate one. This
patch allows a developer to focus on just one package, instead of the
entire recipe.


> Are the going to be problems if users want to deploy more than one
> package (or switch between a full deploy and a package) and don't
> deploy and undeploy in the right order?
>

In my patch I added a --package option to "devtool deploy-target" but not
to "devtool undeploy-target". devtool keeps track of what files were
uploaded by creating a per-package list on the target itself (in
/.devtool). When you undeploy a recipe, it simply looks for this recipe
file on the target, reads the files listed there, and undeploys each of the
files in that list.

Therefore, mixing and matching deploys and undeploys amongst recipes don't
interfere with each other.

I checked at the time, but I'm not 100% sure now, but I believe if one
deploys two packages from one recipe, the on-target file gets appended. But
now I'm not 100% sure, so I'll verify this tomorrow (thanks for the
reminder). As such, under my scheme, you can deploy recipes and packages at
will, but then only undeploy the whole kit and caboodle in one go; given a
recipe name to undeploy, whatever it finds in the on-target record will get
undeployed.

I think any developer will find this reasonable behaviour (but maybe not?).

In any case, my patch doesn't affect any existing workflows. If a developer
never notices the new --package option and simply continues to use "devtool
deploy-target" with just a recipe name, the behaviour will be exactly the
same. Only when the --package option is used will the new behaviour occur.

I'll verify deploying multiple packages from the same recipe to confirm
they append the list file. I'll also verify deploying the same package
multiple times (although my guess is there'll be no difference between this
and the existing behaviour should one deploy the same recipe multiple
times).
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