[oe] RFC: new stable release

[Mike (mwester)]

Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote:
> 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?

+1 from me.

I'd also suggest that it might be helpful if we could define one or a
few "reference host configurations".  On this side of the pond, for
commercial work that would be RHEL4 or RHEL5.  I'll volunteer to set up
such a reference host, and document the necessary packages/patches
required to build the stable branch on that platform.


-Mike (mwester)