[oe] RFC: new stable release

[Marcin Juszkiewicz]

Hi

I know that there were lot of talks about creating stable branch of 
OpenEmbedded in last months. But we need stable branch for vendors which 
use our product.

As some people know I am working for Bug Labs company. Their product 
named 'BUG Linux' is based on Poky 'pinky' (last stable release). We 
were considering switch to newer (but never released) version named 
'elroy' but recently we decided to switch to OpenEmbedded. 

But to what kind of OE? Development branch change every day and things 
break from time to time, packages get version bumps without notifying 
anyone etc. Other possibility would be switch to stable branch but 
current one is deprecated and not maintained anymore.

So the situation looks like we will need new stable branch with few 
maintainers (I will be one of them) and with proper policies for merging 
updates from development tree of OE. I maintained OE branches used for 
OpenZaurus/Familiar few years ago so can say that I have needed 
experience for it.

Which things needs defining? I have few in mind:

1. Adding new things. This should be possible only by backporting from
   OE.dev tree and needs to be Acked by at least 2-3 developers which
   use stable branch. New code has to build for at least one distro and
   ARM+x86 architectures (unless it is related to one arch or even one 
   machine).

2. Marking recipes as buildable or not. With over 6000 of them it is
   really hard to check everything for status. We can remove many old
   versions but sometimes they are useful for some projects. I would   
   rather add things like BUILDABLE_armv4t = "1" into recipe or into
   conf/distro/include/${DISTRO}-status.inc file. Similar status for
   recipes which are known to not work for some archs.

3. Dealing with non buildable stuff. We have 'nonworking' and 'obsolete' 
   dirs in metadata - both should be dropped in stable branch. Other
   recipes can be marked as not buildable or dropped from branch - I did
   not thought yet on it.

4. Lifetime of branch. Will we do new stable release after 6 months or
   after one year? For how long stable branch will be supported by OE
   itself? I know that there will be companies which will provide
   support for longer time - thats what I do with Poky 'pinky' now.

What do you feel about it? Any opinions or suggestions? Want to join 
effort?

Regards, 
-- 
JID:      hrw at jabber.org
Website:  http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinjuszkiewicz
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