[yocto] <rant>the current yocto FAQ is pretty much valueless</rant>

[Tim Bird]

On 06/26/2012 10:18 AM, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
> On 26/06/12 17:53, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>>   and if you want major industry players to take yocto seriously, the
>> last thing you want to do is answer their heartfelt pleas for
>> assistance with, "i'm sorry, that's technically not a yocto question,
>> you should try another mailing list."
> 
> That's never been case on this list as far as I recall, folk here are
> pretty responsive to questions being asked.
> 
> At the same time, OE/Poky/Yocto is a fairly complex framework and nobody
> should expect that the necessary expertize to build a commercial grade
> products with it can be acquired by simply reading a FAQ, no matter how
> well written, or by just endlessly asking questions on a mailing list.
> As a commercial player you are either prepared to make the in house
> investment that is necessary to acquire that expertize (reading the
> documentation and studying the source code, etc.), or you you can buy
> the expertize on commercial basis from someone who has it.

Well, granted that OE/Poky/Yocto is fairly complex.  I've followed
OE for years (though never successfully built anything with it).
I had my first successful build of (Poky?, Yocto?) just recently,
with a build image I got from Dave Stewart at LinuxCon Japan.
(Thanks very much Dave!).

However, complexity is no excuse for terrible FAQs.  And the FAQ
on the wiki is pretty bad.  For example, after reading various FAQs
I still have no idea what kind of thing "Poky" is.  I know
that bitbake is a build tool.  I know that OE is a package
meta-information project.  Yocto Project is an umbrella project
for a lot of tools and technologies (Poky among them).  But is
Poky a distro (sample/reference or otherwise?) or something else?

When I ran my recently-built image, my target /etc/issue had this content:
"Yocto (Built by Poky 7.0) 1.2"

Is Poky a build system?  A distro? a managed set of package sources
and build information?

I don't even know what to make of this.  And this is from a developer
pushing Yocto inside my company (where we are making the "in-house
investment" that is claimed to be needed to do something with this.)

Now, here's my disclaimer: I read the manuals in the past
and found them hard to follow, and thus finding my desire to
read them again somewhat diminished, I haven't done so lately.
Also, I don't mean to pick on "Poky" - that's just the thing du-jour
that I'm not clear about within the Yocto Project.
Maybe the definition of Poky is crystal clear somewhere in the docs.
If so, sorry for the rant.

But yeah, a FAQ cleanup and build-out would be good.  I think one
problem is that various people who are qualified to make FAQ entries
are so close to the project that certain features and terminology
are second-nature to them, and go unspoken or unclarified in the
entries. I'm not in this category, so if I find some time I'll
try to make a few FAQ entries that address the points of
confusion I've seen.
 -- Tim

=============================
Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Workgroup of the Linux Foundation
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Network Entertainment
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