[oe] Splitting meta-oe?

[Patrick Ohly]

On Tue, 2018-02-20 at 18:52 +0000, Richard Purdie wrote:
> Even once we do that, we (as in YP) can't send out a clear message
> about what we're testing and users will clone meta-oe and expect
> everything to work. So right now I do have problems trying to get to
> a point where YP can use meta-oe effectively.

We had the same issue in refkit: the bblayers.conf.sample enabled a
large amount of layers, but the distro itself only needed and could
test only a subset of the recipes in those layers.

We solved this with supported-recipes.bbclass [1] and an explicit list
of recipes that were considered part of the distro [2] and thus got
tested. A "bitbake world" only builds those recipes. Users of the
distro could enable additional recipes, but then knew that they were on
their own regarding those.

[1] https://github.com/intel/intel-iot-refkit/blob/master/meta-refkit-core/classes/supported-recipes.bbclass
[2] https://github.com/intel/intel-iot-refkit/blob/master/meta-refkit/conf/distro/include/refkit-supported-recipes.txt

Note that this mechanism also allowed us to support only a subset of,
for example, OE-core: we settled on systemd as the only supported init
system, so sysvinit wasn't listed as supported. This is something that
cannot realistically be achieved by splitting up layers and/or repos
containing layers.

-- 
Best Regards, Patrick Ohly

The content of this message is my personal opinion only and although
I am an employee of Intel, the statements I make here in no way
represent Intel's position on the issue, nor am I authorized to speak
on behalf of Intel on this matter.