[oe] [RFC] policy about nonworking recipes

[Rolf Leggewie]

Hi,

Koen Kooi wrote:
> On 21-05-09 22:20, Rolf Leggewie wrote:
> 
>> I think that, eventually, "bitbake world" should be working again and
>> usable as a test case.
> 
> A laudable goal...

But not the only one.  And essentially not even the main motivation 
behind this.  For lack of a better description I'd say it's "OE should 
just work" instead of "OE has a gazillion recipes to build a 
fantastillion packages"*.

* "but most of them won't build for you and you only find out after 
compiling for 48 hours, sorry"

>> I suggest to use COMPATIBLE_MACHINE because I
>> assume that to be the more common issue.
> 
> NAK, we have a perfectly good EXCLUDE_FROM_WORLD = "1" for that, which 
> is already used in lots (well, 23) recipes and classes.

Any bb in the repo should be buildable or clearly say where it is not 
and exclude itself from any build where it isn't suitable. 
EXCLUDE_FROM_WORLD does not do that, so it's not a solution.

DEFAULT_PREFERENCE -1 would be feasible but that just says "doesn't 
work" whereas COMPATIBLE_MACHINE is more than likely to be a step in the 
right direction (again, assuming most situations where things don't work 
here but work for somebody else will be machine-dependent).  The 
semantics of COMPATIBLE_MACHINE being "no compatible machines known to 
the last committer".  If it turns out to be a host-dependent issue, 
instead, then the next commit should replace the COMPATIBLE_MACHINE line 
with one listing only the COMPATIBLE_HOSTs.

I'm all ears for differing suggestions, but EXCLUDE_FROM_WORLD isn't 
really a solution.

Regards

Rolf