[oe] RFC: new stable release

[Marcin Juszkiewicz]

Dnia wtorek, 17 marca 2009 o 15:50:43 Koen Kooi napisał(a):
> On 17-03-09 15:38, Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote:
> > 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).
>
> So things must get tested before committing, right?

Yes. If change which was tested only on ARM I can run test for x86 but 
this will enlarge review time.

> > 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.
>
> Just have a CSV file that includes the test coverage for package +
> machines. We can have one per distro. If needed we can extract the
> info from tinderbox after we've done a few builds.

The CSV file is ok for me too - small script added into contrib/ would 
show this data in more handy way.

> > 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.
>
> That does mean you can't easily resurrect recipes, but seeing that
> only happens once every 5 years or so..

"All changes has to exists in .dev tree" so if someone will fix broken 
recipe then change will land in .dev first probably... Unless there is 
no same version in .dev anymore.

> > 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.
>
> The previous branch had a 12 + 3 month lifecycle, 12 months of
> support then 3 months to wind down.

1 year sounds good. Poky 'pinky' is about 1 year old and still usable.

> I certainly want to join the effort, but I fear that creating a
> stable branch might make some people more inclined to dump even worse
> crap in .dev, which would not be a good thing. So *if* we go with a
> stable branch we should make sure .dev well be in a good shape as
> well.

There always will be good and bad things with .dev branch. We can look 
to adapt some rules from stable to .dev later. Larger changes can go 
through separate branches.

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