[oe] Splitting meta-oe?

[Martin Hundebøll]

On 2018-02-21 14:57, Tom Rini wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 09:10:25PM -0300, Otavio Salvador wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 9:07 PM, Otavio Salvador
>> <otavio at ossystems.com.br> wrote:
>>> On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 3:52 PM, Richard Purdie
>>> <richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>>>> I could combo-layer pieces of meta-oe into poky but I'd imagine that
>>>> would create more problems than it would solve too and given the
>>>> general dislike of combo-layer, I think ultimately better layer tooling
>>>> would be a better answer and more acceptable to everyone.
>>>
>>> Poky creates more problems then it solves
>>
>> ... send was too soon ...
>>
>> Poky creates more problems then it solves.
>>
>>   - it causes confusion
>>   - it avoids the urgency in adopting a setup script
>>   - it does not use the layers as we market as being a good thing
>>
>> So adding more things to it, just makes it worse.
>>
>> The setup script is more urgent to be discussed then splitting meta-oe.
> 
> I agree that a setup script of some sort (off the top of my head,
> something that takes layer-names as input, checks vs a list,
> fetches/clones, creates a wrapper around bitbake-layers to always add
> them) should be a high priority.  I don't have a problem telling my
> customers to clone meta-openembedded and then use the layers that are
> needed in that specific project.  But it's painful to have a shell
> for-loop in the docs we provide so they can setup a build.

Now that the discussion branched out a bit...

We would like better support for this too. Our setup uses a "manifest" 
repository with git submodules to setup the layers:

 > yocto/
 >       meta-poky/
 >       meta-qt5/
 >       meta-foo/
 >       meta-bar/
 >       conf/
 >            bblayers.conf
 >            local.conf
 >       .gitmodules

With this setup, customers simply need to clone our yocto repo 
recursively, run `yocto/meta-poky/oe-init-build-env yocto` and then 
`bitbake image-recipe`.

But this is rather inflexible, as it requires the "yocto" folder to be 
the build folder to activate the config files...

We looked into putting the configs in "meta-foo/conf/*.conf.sample" and 
using TEMPLATECONF, but the "oe-init-build-env" script is rather picky 
about poky being the "top" directory.

I guess the oe-init-build-env script can be changed to look for 
.templateconf in any parent folder?

// Martin