[oe] How should OE be used?

[Philip Balister]

Recently, I've been spending some time thinking how people use OE for 
building software. It seems like there are several groups of people 
interested in and actually using OE for serious work (by serious I mean, 
there is real money involved). At OEDEM, I would like to see some 
discussion how the PE project can improve interaction with outside 
developers and vendors.

As an example, how should OE interact with the company that sells 
gumstix? Currently, they have a copy of buildroot they use to create 
software for their product. The buildroot solution is not a perfect one 
for them, see:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=65AAF154-3C05-4836-952B-E5FF2E40E34C%40ecs.soton.ac.uk&forum_name=gumstix-users

Understanding that gumstix has a large customer base, how should they 
use OE? I do not think a solution that has their customer base working 
against .dev would be an improvement (stability wise) from their 
"private" buildroot system. Also, the idea of adding that entire user 
community to the oe-dev/user listservs would drown out other, equally 
worthy lines of hardware.

Anyway, this is what has started me thinking. What I would like to do, 
is create a list of how people use OE, and what concerns they have about 
interactions with outside development teams. Once we have this list, 
then we can have a conversation about what we can do to make things work 
well for all OE developers and users.

Here are my preliminary thoughts:

How do people use OE?

  * Basic install image and user adds packages
  * Install image that user does not change, part of a "product"

Why is it important work effectively with third party developers

  * Enhance projects (both OE and third parties)
  * Create jobs for OE devs (that want them)
  * Reduce friction
  * Eliminate FUD

Basic issues for third party users of OE to build systems:

  * What is OE? A distribution, or a distribution creation tool?
  * Need to build product with a stable base.
  * A way to keep proprietary content separate from OE.
  * How do software developers use OE to write/debug code?
  * What is the right way to support hardware?

Issues for OE developers:

  * Third parties need to feed bug fixes and new work into .dev.
  * How to not overwhelm OE devs with support requests.
  * How does OE scale to large numbers of users?

For now, I'd like to focus on working out how people use OE and what 
issues they have. Once we understand what problems exist, if any, we can 
discuss solutions.

Philip
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