[oe] How should OE be used?

[Lorn Potter]

Craig Hughes wrote:
> 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.  

not really,.

> 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.  

Not necessarily. Where's the ipkg for a custom device that hasn't been 
built yet?


> Buildroot is  
> missing 90% of the packages which are in OE, and for those, in  

Most people are not going to want to build 90% of the packages in oe, 
especially for embedded/small devices.
We have a custom build script for the greenphone that builds the 
toolchain, uses those libs/binutils for the system, then 
downloads/builds 24 packages. at _most_.


> 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.

Makefile format is more widely known than the format and syntax used in OE.

> 
> 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 ;)


-- 
Lorn 'ljp' Potter
Software Engineer, Systems Group, MES, Trolltech