[oe] Yocto Project and OE - Where now?

[Tom Rini]

On 01/18/2011 01:05 AM, Otavio Salvador wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 05:21, Graeme Gregory<dp at xora.org.uk>  wrote:
>> On 17/01/2011 19:01, Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:
>>> - where possible stick to one recipe per package. This reduces the
>>> maintenance work and reduces the QA nightmare of lots of different
>>> permutations.
>>> I feel one recipe per package should be the common case for
>>> applications, and preferably also for libs (although I am well aware
>>> that especially in the latter case multiple versions cannot always be
>>> avoided).
>>
>> OE is not a distro so this is a non starter already, please don't bog
>> down this discussion by re-opening this again. Angstrom 2008, Angstrom
>> 2010, kaelios and slugos are all released distributions with different
>> versions of apps just as a starter and they arent even near the total
>> number of distros in OE.
>
> I disagree. I think having too many versions of a package just makes
> difficult to get things done:
>
>   - it increases the amount of maintainence work;
>   - has a bigger time to get bugs spoted;
>
> Users of old distros ought to use a specific repository and branch.
> Master ought to be kept clean for 'next distro release'.

I agree, at least going forward.  We must make it easier for 
distributions to say "here is my 'stable' release" and "here is my 
development release".

First, I'm not picking on Angstrom here, really, I swear.  It's just a 
good example.

But we also don't want to be unreasonable or unbending here.  We'll have 
to have multiple udevs (due to having different kernel versions as some 
HW isn't on the latest and greatest).  And if DistroA says they really 
want to stick to busybox 1.17.4 for a while, we should let that happen 
too.  But I don't think we want to have to carry on the recipes that 
angstrom-2008.1 wants and angstrom-2010.x wants and angstrom-2011.x 
wants and angstrom-2012.x want into 2013, in master.

For example, at some point we want to switch to libtool 2.4 only.  And 
that would certainly be a headache for angstrom-2008.1 (but we're glad, 
really! for angstrom-2010.x using 2.4 and testing and fixing things). 
So wouldn't it be a good thing to be able to say that if you want 
angstrom-2008.1 you do ... this ... and get the layers that give a good 
stable 2008.1, based on whatever policy Angstrom wants for doing updates?

-- 
Tom Rini
Mentor Graphics Corporation