[oe] Moving to layered structure of openembedded metadata

[Frans Meulenbroeks]

2010/11/5 Denys Dmytriyenko <denis at denix.org>:
> On Thu, Nov 04, 2010 at 04:34:42PM -0700, Khem Raj wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> In recent discussions there seems to be a lot of interest in moving
>> towards more layered structure in OE where we discussed machine
>> layers and arch based layers. There certainly are advantages to this
>> approach as discussed in other threads on mailing list
>> I think poky has already achieved that to a certain extent and has
>> made metadata changes
>> needed for such a structure. There are other polishing to metadata
>> which is beneficial in general like recipe licenses, gcc runtime
>> demystification etc. I would like to suggest that we adopt this
>> structure and use Poky as core layer which we
>> should always maintain in coherence and add the extra
>> machines,architectures and recipes as additional layers around
>> the base layer.
>>
>> This will also help us to scale the project and
>> reduce the to and fro in merges as well as communities at large will
>> benefit by seamless flow
>> of patches and other contributions.
>>
>> This will of course need a lot of work and I wanted to bring to
>> everyone to know if this would be a good approach moving
>> forward.
>
> Khem,
>
> That is already being discussed and decided. See the following previous topics
> on the mailing list...
>
> The raw OEDEM meeting notes, where if you read carefully (and between the
> lines :) you can see the suggestion of using Poky as a new core being
> discussed:
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.openembedded/39108
>
> Call for open discussion and future plans for advancing OpenEmbedded and
> Yocto Project:
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.openembedded/39114
>
> --
> Denys

Denys, I don't think it is decided yet.
At OEDEM it was suggested and discussed, but not really decided. (and
actually I doubt if OEDEM would be the right place to decide this,
especially in such a short timeframe without getting the rest of the
community involved).
And the call for open discussion is just that, a call for open discussion.

However, I do see consensus emerging, and personally I think the
proposal of Khem is a good idea.
Actually I already did a small test. It seems the most troublesome
issues in merging things are
- the legacy staging that still exists in quite some OE recipes
- bbclasses that are out of sync (or do not exist in yocto, but in
that case they could be in an OE overlay)
- toolchain related issues. E.g. for ppc there is no spe support yet
in yocto; however this is being worked on)

I know merging it will still be a lot of work and won't happen without fallout.
Then again I am more than willing to do my share of the work. My main
concern is how to deal with all the old stuff we accumulated.
In order to move to a layered structure with quality recipes we might
need to move them over one by one (fixing things like LICENSE while
we're at it).

Frans