[oe] Splitting meta-oe

[Martin Jansa]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 12:48:11PM +0000, Paul Eggleton wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> 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?

I don't see problems as it's now and I fear that splitting it even more
will result only in more complexity.

If there are problems with some recipes then we should try to fix them
no matter in which even smaller layer they belong.

I think we should rather address that issue with layer "priority" which
should be easier to understand and adjust in bblayers.conf.

And that DEFAULT_PREFERRENCE should be respected across layers, IIRC if
you add newer less-well tested version of some recipe (like I did with
libsoup-2.4 in meta-efl) then it's preferred over "stable" version in
oe-core even when it has lower D_P -1.

And we should continue to replace .bb files which exists in meta-oe and
also in oe-core with .bbappends.

Cheers,

-- 
Martin 'JaMa' Jansa     jabber: Martin.Jansa at gmail.com
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