[oe] Splitting meta-oe

[Paul Eggleton]

On Wednesday 25 January 2012 12:48:11 Paul Eggleton wrote:
> The meta-oe layer [1] is becoming the home for additional recipes that we
> miss from OE-Classic that don't have another obvious layer to go into, and
> this is a good thing. However I think that meta-oe is already in a state
> where quite a few people feel the new structure is not working for them.
> 
> As I see it, meta-oe is trying provide the following:
> 
>  1) Additional recipes that are not in OE-Core
> 
>  2) Additional functionality for OE-Core recipes that we can't enable in OE-
> Core itself (e.g. enabling postgres support in Qt) - mostly just a
> side-effect of #1
> 
>  3) A place to preserve old versions of recipes that have been removed from
> OE-Core in favour of newer versions
> 
>  4) Newer less-well tested versions of recipes
> 
> I think what most people want when they enable meta-oe in their layer
> configuration is #1, and it's probably OK to get #2 along with it. They do
> not however expect versions of toolchains, eglibc or other fairly
> fundamental bits and pieces that might cause their build to fail when
> everything worked fine just building with OE-Core (#4). Equally I expect
> there will be some people who want just #3 and nothing else.
> 
> I understand there is significant value in providing all of these things, I
> just think we shouldn't be trying to do them all in one largely indivisible
> layer. In our new layer structure we should be able to find a way to split
> the metadata so that people who want any combination can still have what we
> have in meta-oe today, and yet those who just want one of them don't get
> unexpected build failures or older/newer versions being built.
> 
> Thoughts?
>
> [1] http://cgit.openembedded.org/meta-openembedded/tree/meta-oe

Koen, as the maintainer of meta-oe would you like to comment on this thread?

Thanks,
Paul

-- 

Paul Eggleton
Intel Open Source Technology Centre