[oe] [Angstrom-devel] RFC: Add ipkg to minimal image

[Richard Purdie]

On Sun, 2007-12-02 at 16:35 +0100, Koen Kooi wrote:
> To make it a bit more clear:
> 
> There are 3 seperate items being discusses here:
> 
>  1. how to stop a packagemanager getting into an image
>  2. selecting which packageformat the build should use
>  3. selecting which packagemanager handles which packageformat (ipkg can
> handle .debs for example)

An image built with rootfs_deb needs to dpkg+apt, an image built with
rootfs_ipk needs to use ipkg. The two will not currently work the other
way around.

Until that is addressed, points 2 and 3 are the same thing.

> ANGSTROM_PKG_FORMAT handles 2. and 3., but not 1. (yet)

The setting of IMG_PKGTYPE used or the inherit order of the package
classes determine this. Do we need the angstrom specific variable?

> I think having a flag indicating *which* packagemanager gets is (like
> Rods patch does) is a good thing, but a flag toggling the presence of
> the packagemanager wouldn't be, since you can't distinguish the
> resulting images from each other.
> I think creating e.g. <foo>-nopm.bb recipes that do 'require <foo>.bb ;
> PACKAGE_MANAGER = " "' would be the least confusing option.

I agree that specific images should have specific feature sets. This
comes back to my point about the machine=nslu2 needing to make the
console image usable.

Has anyone looked at how Poky does its IMAGE_FEATURES magic (see
poky-image.bbclass)? Adding package-manager as an IMAGE_FEATURE style
option and not as a DISTRO_FEATURE as I previously suggested could
perhaps be a way forward...

Cheers,

Richard