[oe] Eliminating dependency race-conditions (was Re: [PATCH] net-snmp: disable libnl use)

[Esben Haabendal]

On Thu, 2011-03-17 at 18:05 +0000, Phil Blundell wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-03-17 at 18:52 +0100, Esben Haabendal wrote:
> > Well, it might be possible to minimize the disruption for a transitional
> > period by carefully specifying some catch-all build-time package
> > dependencies pulling in all packages for recipes not ported yet.
> 
> Yes, that's the sort of thing I was thinking of.  It isn't even totally
> obvious to me that specifying individual packages is any better than
> "all packages from recipe X", since with the former you then have a
> potential maintenance headache if files get moved from one package to
> another.

There is a number of ways that I believe package based build
dependencies are better than recipe based.

a) It is possible to depend on parts of a recipe, which fx. is useful
when a recipe provides more than 1 library, where you might not want all
of them.

b) To build a recipe, you depend on some stuff which you don't need to,
or perhaps even really don't want to pass on to recipes depending on
this recipe.

c) KISS. Using the actual target packages for satisfying build-time
dependencies are a very simple approach, which I strongly believe will
make OE a better tool in the long run, by reducing complexity, and thus
lowering the bar for contributing to OE archictural work.

The maintenance headache you talk about is already there.  In OE-lite
build-time dependency 95% of the time just follow the run-time
dependencies, perhaps making it easier to maintain than OE, as we don't
have to think about another type of "item names" to depend on.

/Esben