[yocto] Mentor's Application Development Environment (ADE)

[Christopher Larson]

Greetings folks,

I'm emailing to ascertain the potential interest in a piece of functionality Mentor has been including in our MEL product, and see if it'd be something either we could push up under the Yocto umbrella, or potentially reimplemented in concert with upstream folk to better meet folks needs.

This feature is a means of distribution of sysroot content (libraries, headers, potentially host scripts and binaries) from the person doing the bitbake builds to a potential application developer using eclipse. This is a different approach than that taken by the ADT, as this doesn't require a poky development environment, so is potentially more useful for application developers.

In concept it's quite simple. We construct an eclipse P2 IU (installable unit) and binary artifact for every binary package we emit, and build a P2 repository with those. This repository can be added to eclipse, and you can pick and choose any of the packages we emitted, including -dev, -dbg content and it installs it into a sysroot relative to the eclipse install directory, where you could then point your application project. It's really not unlike adding a new package management format, as that's what P2 really is, a package management / content distribution system. I think it provides a fair bit of value, but I'd like to get the opinions of others on this.

The current implementation has a python script which converts an ipk package repository into a p2 repository. I intend to move toward a package_p2.bbclass type approach, emitting xml snippets for each along with the artifact as we go, and then have the feed construction reassemble the component metadata into the appropriate artifact and IU xml files, which would more closely mirror the way our other package management formats behave.

Thoughts?
-- 
Christopher Larson

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