[yocto] Web Hob - two additional design ideas

[Stewart, David C]

Gang - there are a couple of ideas for Web Hob that we have talked about. I don't remember seeing them in the various movies and documents. So I'm going to throw them out there to get your feedback and hopefully get them in the design.

* Visualizing the image

One of the things which frustrates me about GUI tools which build Linux images is that you usually get a long list of packages to choose from, but no real guidance. I think there are a couple of interesting ways to visualize what is in the image.

One would be to add more visual information about what makes up the image, maybe like a pie chart or linear chart which shows the breakdown between kernel, libraries, commands; perhaps with some drill down into these categories to show which libraries, for example.  This could be extremely useful for tuning a poky-tiny image for its footprint size.

I find I'm also struggling with figuring out how to add a whole subsystem, rather than picking out the packages.  This goes beyond the scroll list of packages to add higher-level groups of packages. This might be already present in how we present Tasks to select, so it might already be there.

* Finalizing your device's source offer

One of the things the Project has been praised on is our support for building license compliant embedded distributions. This turns out to be one of the biggest challenges when people use Linux for their embedded devices - often the Linux gets shipped out on the embedded device, but the sources are not made available as specified in the GPL.  Through our tracking and validating of source licenses in recipes, the logic in the build system to restrict licenses used, and the source manifests generated in the build, I think we have a world class solution. This really needs to be supported well in Web Hob.

So the requirement here is that when a build is completed, you not only get access to the image (and kernel) but maybe also a tar file of the sources and scripts used to build the image, for purposes of GPL license compliance.