[oe] Some open issues

[Richard Purdie]

Hi Guys,

I have a few issues with the way certain things have happened recently.

1. The FILE_PR change.

This was mentioned in an email on Wednesday with the title "[oe] [RFC]
Enable --hash-style=both for all recent gcc4 targets" at 9am. At 8pm we
have "I decided to land now as PRs are changing all the time and keeping
up with things is pretty hard...". This is not in keeping with the major
changes policy we agreed by any stretch of the imagination.

This change breaks compatibility with everyone's overlays and creates
the nightmare scenario of external OE "branches" being forced into the
change or forever being unable to sync (Openmoko and Poky spring to
mind).

What is most annoying is that given a bit longer I think we could have
done something that would have meant this was unnecessary, specifically
inserted the revision into the package at package_*.bbclass time where
we can manipulated PR as needed. This combined with a staging ABI change
would have been all that was needed. If staging ABI isn't enough, we can
insert the modified PR into STAMPS instead of the real PR or some other
magic. My point is that there are better options than FILE_PR, it just
needs some thought. The fact the testing branch had so many merge issues
should have meant a better idea was sought, not that is should be
committed ASAP.

2. The Git conversion including the BKCVS data.

I'd made it quite clear this should have been a tree graft and this
wasn't done so we're now stuck with broken history :(. This is pretty
frustrating since I'd repeatedly said not to include it and went to the
effort of gathering my conversion data and sending it to Jan who then
didn't realise what I meant by graft (though no fault of his own).

3. Merging Bitbake into OE

People are saying things like "Might be a chance to reconsider
maintaining BitBake in the OE repository.". Could people please talk to
the bitbake maintainer about things like this *before* encouraging it in
public. If we need a release lets make one (which seems to be the real
problem).

4. Bitbake changes

These should go to the bitbake list as well as the OE list and should be
discussed. I've raised issues with patches which have been ignored and
these patches have now just need committed. I'm not happy about the
process that was used :(. I know people have various commitments but we
need to try and stick to some kind of process for this kind of thing.


Where from here?

I'd actually like to a strong line on this and suggest we revert the
FILE_PR change since its badly thought out and also that we consider
redoing the git conversion ASAP and the replaying the recent commits
before its too late to get rid of the corruption in there. This is
probably going to have to go to a core team vote since its a pretty big
change to suggest but opinions are welcome.

Richard