[yocto] Web Hob's design - missing developer workflow?

[Stewart, David C]

Gang - I was talking with Jessica today about the WebHob design and how we want to prioritize some of the feature development. (And I want to say here, I really appreciate the clarity and thought process Jessica is bringing to the discussion!)

It dawned on me as we were talking that we may have something really fundamental missing in the design in the area of workflow. I don't know that we have yet thought through the story of how someone uses this thing to get their job done.  Let me give you a couple of examples:

I'm developing an embedded device which is headless, based on a particular board. It's similar enough to Baryon that I can start there.  So in Web Hob, I pick my machine type and build profile, I add in the BSP layer and Baryon layer and do a build. It succeeds, so I can now boot up my board and it works.

Now I want to do something like change the default root password. OK, I don't know where that file is located so how do I edit it? (Remember, there are no local files to do a find | grep to locate "passwd" anyplace.) So how do I change this?

In fact, if I want to edit any of the static files we provide in YP, I don't know how to do this.

Next I want to add my own application, which consists of .c files, .h files and a makefile. (Because I am really old school). So I create a .bb file for this and then... what? How do I get this collection of files into my project in WebHob to build it?

For that last one, I guess I could treat it as a layer, since I see a way to provide an external layer to WebHob. OK, it means I need to create a conf/layer.conf file, right? Do I have any clues on how to do this or am I on my own?

Oh, and when I tried to make my new layer build, I had a compile error, which I just fixed in a .c file. How do I get that file onto the WebHob server? Do I need to reload the whole layer?

If you have followed me so far on this journey, you can see that we have created a system which can build a custom linux and add/remove packages. But when it comes to the steps of actually doing real development, I think there is still something missing.

I would challenge the team to think through the bigger developer's story line and make sure we have the support we need in WebHob.  Thanks...

Dave
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