[oe] [RFC] policy about nonworking recipes

[Philip Balister]

Koen Kooi wrote:
> On 21-05-09 23:12, Rolf Leggewie wrote:
>>  The semantics of COMPATIBLE_MACHINE being "no compatible machines 
> known to
>> the last committer".
> 
> COMPATIBLE_MACHINE has a well defined meaning, which doesn't lend it for 
> this kind of pendantry. COMPATIBLE_MACHINE is meant to prevent people 
> building a recipe whose packages have no chance of *running* on a 
> different machine (kernels being the most obvious examples, hardware 
> daemons less so). It has no place in tagging build time brokenness.

Heh, I was just writing this same thought. I do think your approach will 
confuse the meaning of COMPATIBLE_MACHINE. I was on the urge of trying 
to say the same thing (and failing) when Koen's email came through.

Koen also raises some good points in the rest of his email.

Philip

> 
>> 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.
> 
> So let's say you want to build pulseaudio, which requires a recent 
> autoconf. And your distro locks that down to an ancient version. You get 
> a weird error message that doesn't indicate the problem (most likely a 
> broken makefile). So you try all machines present in OE and none works 
> and then add COMPATIBLE_MACHINE = "", a while after that someone builds 
> it for another distro, that does have the correct autoconf version 
> (unbeknowst to the user) and replaces it with COMPATIBLE_HOST (which is 
> really COMPATIBLE_ARCH, so not for 'host' issues, but target issues).
> Anyone looking at the history of the recipe will draw the wrong 
> conclusions, since you decided to make it a COMPATIBLE_MACHINE thing, 
> instead of using EXCLUDE_FROM_WORLD (which has a meaning to bitbake/OE) 
> or BROKEN = 1 (which has no meaning to bitbake/OE, only to OE devs).
> 
> But more importantly, a lot of people (and companies) are using OE in 
> ways we don't know about, so deleting things, or preventing them being 
> parsed is stabbing them in the eye.
> 
> If the recipes offend you, you can bbmask them out in local.conf or in 
> your distro.conf, but stop making life harder for the rest of us, the 
> time needed to undelete or un-COMPATIBLE_MACHINE recipes isn't free. 
> Time spent hearing people bitch about deleted recipes isn't free either. 
> OE isn't wikipedia were deleting a cool way to boost your streetcred.
> 
> And I think that ultimately it's a distro choice which targets should be 
> buildable, if a distro says that 'world' isn't supported, so be it.
> 
> 
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