[oe] [OE-core] RFC: meta-oe appends and overlayed recipes

[Richard Purdie]

On Tue, 2013-02-12 at 09:24 +0000, Paul Eggleton wrote:
> On Monday 11 February 2013 22:35:47 Richard Purdie wrote:
> > On Mon, 2013-02-11 at 17:09 +0000, Paul Eggleton wrote:
> > > *
> > > meta-oe/recipes-qt/packagegroups/packagegroup-qte-toolchain-target.bbappe
> > > nd This is adding qwt to the qte toolchain. As far as I am concerned this
> > > is a distro policy decision - Qwt is a third-party library that is not
> > > part of Qt. I believe this should be moved to the layers for whichever
> > > distros want this.
> > > 
> > > * meta-oe/recipes-qt/qt4/qt4-x11-free_4.8.4.bbappend
> > > * meta-oe/recipes-qt/qt4/qt4-embedded_4.8.4.bbappend
> > > These two add MySQL and PostgreSQL support to Qt and Qt/Embedded. I see
> > > this as a distro policy decision; these should move to the layers for
> > > whichever distros want this. FWIW, this is particularly egregious if
> > > you've already built Qt, then add meta-oe and find Qt is being
> > > unexpectedly rebuilt.
> > If these were implemented as PACKAGECONFIG options, then distros would
> > just need to set the appropriate PACKAGECONFIG for the package in the
> > distro config and we wouldn't even need the appends...
> 
> The thing is the Qt configure options are a little more complicated - many of 
> them are three-state switches (enable built-in, enable as a plugin or 
> disabled). Thus we've opted to split the configuration options into variables 
> for each type. We don't get PACKAGECONFIG's DEPENDS handling, but if we used 
> PACKAGECONFIG we'd lose some flexibility.

Is there a way we can at least have it behave in a similar way to
PACKAGECONFIG? Can those configuration variables be set from the
distro? 

My main point is that I'd like to not need bbappend files just for
configuration.

Cheers,

Richard