[oe] Yocto Project and OE - Where now?

[C Michael Sundius]

in rereading this I don't want to seem ungrateful, since we've certainly
benefited from the great effort on everyones part (package and distro
maintainers, yacto and OE... everyone).

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 1:55 PM, C Michael Sundius <msundius at sundius.com>wrote:

>
> 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 single one using an outdated version of the software.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
>
>