[oe] Splitting meta-oe?

[Andreas Müller]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 7:28 PM, Joe MacDonald <Joe_MacDonald at mentor.com> wrote:
> [Re: [oe] Splitting meta-oe?] On 17.02.17 (Fri 19:02) Martin Jansa wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 06:24:09PM +0100, Andreas Müller wrote:
>> > On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 6:07 PM, Burton, Ross <ross.burton at intel.com> wrote:
>> > > The recent storm of breakage in meta-oe caused by recipe specific sysroots
>> > > was quite dramatic:
>> > >
>> > > ross at flashheart ~/Yocto/meta-oe ((044e518...))
>> > > $ git grep PNBLACKLIST| wc -l
>> > > 320
>> > >
>> > > Is it time to talk about splitting meta-oe into smaller real repositories
>> > > so they can be maintained at their own pace by more maintainers?
>> > >
>> > > Ross
>> > What exactly gets better by splitting?
>>
>> I agree with Andreas.
>
> And I agree with both of you.
>
>> 1) RSS is good thing.
>>
>> 2) The breakage wasn't caused by lack of maintainers (at least I don't
>>    think that I or Joe were the bottleneck for integrating the fixes).
>
> My schedule is highly variable but I do try to be responsive to
> breakages and I do my best to watch and digest the state of the world
> messages, those are extremely valuable IMO.
>
>> 3) More maintainers doesn't mean more contributions from people actually
>>    using now broken components, it's actually easier to just send a fix
>>    than to be a maintainer of some layer just to be able to also merge
>>    your fix yourself.
>>
>> 4) It doesn't look so dramatic if it turns out that 200 of those
>>    blacklisted recipes weren't actually used by anyone still active in
>>    OE ecosystem.
>
> Agreed.  And if those blacklisted recipes are something that someone
> in the ecosystem cares about, they really should be sending fixes back
> upstream.  Breaking meta-oe up into smaller parts doesn't seem likely to
> make them more likely to send patches, AFAICT.  Probably won't make them
> less-so, either, but I don't see changing the structure to be a
> significant win.
>
> And do note that when we first created meta-networking I was proposing
> it be separate from meta-oe, I'm now completely on the other side of
> that argument, for what that's worth.
>
>> 5) If someone wants to replace me as meta-oe maintainer, go ahead, it
>>    stopped being fun for me long time ago, now it's just slightly annoying
>>    routine which takes my free time I would rather invest in something
>>    cooler
>
> I frankly think that'd be a loss for everyone, but it's understandable.
> That's a big, largely thankless job you've taken on.  Obviously I can't
> offer to take on more of the job than I already have with
> meta-networking or I would, but maybe someone else with a similarly "big
> picture" view will be able to share some of the workload.
Agreed. Martin you are doing a great job and without you projects
would break into 'private' layers. This cannot be the target. Coming
to blacklisting: This is the only way for you to force people start
fixing things. Nobody expects you fixing things out of your interest.

>From my personal perspective as 'maintainer' of e.g
meta-xfce/meta-office/meta-qt5-extra:

* there is only very limited community - I take care for these layers
more or less myself (ok meta-xfce has seen more than the others)

* due to many oddities as
    * Cmake is cross mess
    * Qt-people write small C++ tools for each and every build-job
    * libreoffice has more or less tailored build system and builds take ages
  caused me to use dirty hacks. Most of those are terribly broken now
- I need to rethink a lot and that takes time.

Coming back to Ross' suggestion: Why panic and break things apart? As
soon as somebody needs an environment requiring current oe-core and
blacklisted recipes in meta-openembedded that person will (hopefully)
send patches. If that lasts - so be it. If there is some pressing for
release cycle - feel free to send patches.

One final note on splitting - has anybody taken a look on layer index
in recent past? I think that shows what will happen if we split.
People come 'yeah I have a great layer', publish that in layer index
and leave after a while. How shall a newbie get into that?

Andreas