[oe] Yocto Project and OE - Where now?

[C Michael Sundius]

It seems to me that this is a bit of a battle between the package
maintainers and the distro maintainers.. Looking at this from my managements
side of things, we use OE as a tool and its really just a means to the end.
our customers demand that we do not change things (versions of software),
they demand stability and they view a change in busybox or anything else a
threat to stability. our management has also made an edict that we can not
use gplv3. For completely non technical reasons we simply cannot move to new
package versions without a substantial business justification. I suspect
that that there are many (more than you realize) folk out there who are
using OE for their own distro. If you simply whack package versions because
something newer came out you will have these people maintaining separate
recipes and we'll be swamped with the load and this tool will loose one of
its best attributes.

The comment that disturbed me was that distros should just move ahead
"because its making things hard for the package maintainer". That doesn't
wash with me because if people are using your package then you should
support it or let someone else be the maintainer. In essence the distro's
use of that package are your customers and the reason you have a job. OE
does not exist as a product, rather a tool that enables customers, you can't
create this in a vacuum without understanding who is using it.

distro maintainers are not all dumb and if they are they'll be the last
single one using an outdated version of the software. When that happens a
smart package maintainer will call it out leave out the old package.
Further, it would be nice for a warning to take place so that it might have
a "depracated" tag associated with the recipe for one release cycle to see
if anyone cribs.

So I'm standing with the guy w/ asbestos short on. I'd like to see that OE
err on the side of "do no harm" to existing users. Its hard enough to rally
the troops to move to updated packages much less updated meta without you
leaving perfectly reasonable versions of software out of oe-core.

mike