[oe] [RFC] a small bbclass for task recipes

[pHilipp Zabel]

On 8/10/07, Richard Purdie <rpurdie at rpsys.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 15:22 +0200, pHilipp Zabel wrote:
> > while looking for the cause of several -dbg packages being included in
> > my latest angstrom-x11-image builds, I noticed that some task packages
> > have -dev, -doc and
> > -dbg versions in the deploy directories because they don't set PACKAGES.
> >
> > To improve consistency, I propose to add a small task.bbclass that does set
> > ALLOW_EMPTY="1", PACKAGES="${PN}" and PACKAGE_ARCH="all".
> > That way simple task recipes can just "inherit task".
> > (If needed, this could be enhanced later with a python script to automatically
> > add -dbg packages that RRECOMMEND the -dbg versions of packages that
> > the main package RDEPENDs upon.)
>
> Creating the -dev and -dbg packages for task packages is intentional.
> The python code to create the RRECOMMENDS you mention already exists in
> the form of depchains in package.bbclass.

Ah, great. I guessed something similar would have to exist, as the process would
be pretty much the same as for usual -dbg packages, right?

> I know this works in poky as its how we create development and debugging
> images, I can't remember whether it was enabled in OE.dev or not but the
> code is there...

I was just wondering because most of the packages that explicitly set
the PACKAGES variable in OE overwrite it completely, thus disabling
-dev and -dbg.
The code you speak of is not enabled for OE.dev as far as I can see,
for example all angstrom -dbg task packages have the same dependencies
as the main ones.
How can I enable this?

> Also, not all task packages are PACKAGE_ARCH = "all" although I guess
> they'll be explicitly marked anyway.

Yes, and in a few places PACKAGE_ARCH is set to "${MACHINE_ARCH}" although
it should be kept at "all" and only some subpackages should be marked
as machine specific. I think "all" is a sane default.

Now my question is, do you, too, like the idea of introducing another
bbclass for those defaults? :)
I guess it should to something like
PACKAGES = "${PN} ${PN}-dbg ${PN}-dev" or not touch packages at all,
if the code also works for -doc and -locale and enable that code,
however it is done.

regards
Philipp