[oe] [RFC] turning conf/machine into a set of bblayers

[Richard Purdie]

On Thu, 2010-10-21 at 11:33 +0200, Koen Kooi wrote:
> Recipes/linux is a mess and recipes/u-boot is as well. It would be a
> nice topic for OEDEM to see if we discuss switching to a poky BSP model.
> It would boil down to:
> 
> 1 base bblayer with shared files:
> * conf/machine/include
> * recipes/linux/*.inc
> 
> 1 bblayer per machine or SOC_FAMILY containing:
> * machine.conf
> * first and second stage bootloaders
> * kernel

In addition you'll most likely need some machine config in the form
of .bbappend files for things like base-files, netbase, xorg-config,
formfactor (in Poky's case).

> So, what are peoples thoughts on this? I haven't thought this through
> myself, so feel free to point out any show stoppers.

Poky is certainly heading in this direction and I've worked to ensure we
have all the needed support in the form of .bbappend, the layer.conf
files and so forth. If for whatever reason there are any other
limitations, we should look at fixing that.

> But any bblayer style split would benefit from OE being a collection of
> git submodules instead of a monolithic tree[1].
>
> [1] Provided git submodules stop sucking so hard in future git versions

If they stopped sucking, maybe...

Cheers,

Richard