[oe] How should OE be used?

[Craig Hughes]

On Sep 24, 2007, at 11:48 AM, Lorn Potter wrote:

> I have always thought that oe needed an easier way to choose packages,
> like buildroot.
>
> Some gui that can edit all the conf's and task's, and image.bb's
> painlessly and easily would make a tom of difference.
> The learning curve for oe is too high.
>
> Take buildroot, for example. A person can download it, run make
> menuconfig, set up the system, arch, and select packages, all in  
> one go.
> You do not need to know that you should have to either edit or create
> your own tasks, or image .bb's, much less the syntax for those files.

You're kind of comparing apples to tangerines though.  In buildroot,  
yes, for packages which already exist (and work properly -- there's  
much dead wood in buildroot) you can select them to be compiled using  
a menuconfig/xconfig thing.  But in OE, you could just download and  
install the .ipkg instead, which is a lot cleaner.  Buildroot is  
missing 90% of the packages which are in OE, and for those, in  
buildroot, you'd have to write your own package/*.mk, as well as  
figure out what patches you need to implement to get the package to  
cross-compile, etc.  And you definitely need to learn the ins and  
outs of how buildroot does things internally to implement one of  
those *.mk files correctly.

But your basic premise of select-packages-to-go-into-image using some  
kind of UI thing does make sense.  I just don't think it's as bad in  
OE as you think, nor as good in buildroot ;)

C