[oe] Cleanup / janitors

[Chris Larson]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 4:30 PM, Tom Rini <tom_rini at mentor.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2010-02-16 at 09:39 +0100, Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:
> > 2010/2/16 Koen Kooi <k.kooi at student.utwente.nl>:
> > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > > Hash: SHA1
> > >
> > > On 16-02-10 00:38, Chris Larson wrote:
> > >> Greetings all,
> > >>
> > >> Per discussion in the TSC meeting this month, I'm sending out this
> email as
> > >> a probe.  Would anyone on the list benefit from a "janitors" type
> project,
> > >> to outline and document specific cleanup tasks and how they should be
> done?
> > >> There are many tasks that need doing which involve editing of large
> amounts
> > >> of files in relatively simple ways, and I suspect, but am not yet
> certain,
> > >> that there are a group of individuals who wish to contribute to the
> project,
> > >> but are new enough that they don't feel confident diving into anything
> > >> invasive.  This sort of a task could be a starting point for that sort
> of
> > >> individual.  Thoughts?  Anyone out there in that camp currently that
> would
> > >> benefit from something like this?
> > >
> > > The first project that comes to mind is converting simple recipes (e.g.
> > > not perl) to new style staging. It's a fairly simple job that has a
> huge
> > > impact.
> >
> > Problem is to do that reliable.
>
> Isn't that a document it right, for Janitors problem?  ie:
> 1. Build recipe foo, with packaged-staging, your resuling pstage file
> is ..../foo_VERSION...ipk.  Copy this somewhere safe.
> 2. Modify recipe foo to use new style
> 3. -c clean foo, build again.
> 4. Examine contents of old and new pstaging file.  If the contents are
> the same (and say, diff rather than just checking names, so that any
> munging is caught), good to go!  If not ...
>
> The idea behind janitors is that there's tasks that can be explained and
> people can pick up and do, but there's some manual intervention and
> checking.  So, if someone fleshed out the above a little more, that
> should be enough for a legacy staging task.


Exactly, yes.  The expectation is these are things that may require a
certain amount of manual work.  If they didn't, we could write a sed script
and call it done.  The thread seems to have gotten quickly sidetracked into
the particular details of this one task.
-- 
Christopher Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Senior Software Engineer, Mentor Graphics