[yocto] Moving angstrom under the yocto banner

[Darren Hart]

On 03/30/2012 06:37 PM, Koen Kooi wrote:
> 
> Op 30 mrt. 2012, om 18:21 heeft Darren Hart het volgende geschreven:
>>
>> So that brings us back to what does it mean for Angstrom to be a Yocto
>> Project project I guess?
>>
>> In my very humble opinion (really), it still makes sense to build
>> Angstrom with the components in the poky repository as part of a Yocto
>> Project release. I understand that there is resistance to this idea.
> 
> Yes, it would force angstrom developers to ignore upstream and work on 
> downstream projects 

That's an understandable concern. If I were a casual observer, I would
expect every project identifying itself with the Yocto Project to
interoperate with eachother at each release point. I would imagine that
Angstrom developers would continue their feature development with the
upstreams of bitbake and oe-core. As a Yocto Project release occurs (or
shortly after, as is the case with many BSPs) I would then expect (again
as a casual observer) that some effort went into ensuring some version
of Angstrom works with the release of the poky repository.

You've mentioned preferring to do this with set versions of bitbake and
oe-core. Do oe-core and bitbake maintain stable branches? I didn't think
they did. This makes it difficult to stabilize a release, and poky
serves this purpose well in my opinion. I'm going to stop going down
this path though as the policies surrounding this aren't clear to me and
would be better coming from others (RP or Chris for example).

Without this, people working with "The Yocto Project" are back to using
different versions of bitbake and oe-core depending on which
distribution or BSP they are building, and we ultimately end up where we
started with unsolvable dependency chains and people passing around
fixup patches for this or that issue.

> or as I will label them from now on: forks.
>
>> Angstrom has been independent from poky and the Yocto Project in the
>> past and I can understand not wanting to lose some of that
>> individuality. However, too much individuality breeds chaos and
>> fragmentation.
> 
> I will draw a line in the sand here and say: Forcing people to ignore 
> upstream (oe-core/bitbake) and force a fork down their throats
> breeds chaos and fragmentation.


Don't be so dramatic Koen :-) Everybody involved knows the bitbake and
oe-core in the poky repository are not forks, at least not in the sense
you portray here. They are snapshots with the same maintainer (or subset
of maintainers). They are no more "forks" than the stable Linux kernels
maintained by Greg KH are forks of Linus' kernel. I won't presume to
make a statement of policy regarding submitting patches against poky
that aren't also destined for oe-core or bitbake as well, but I
personally wouldn't deign to submit such a patch for fear of the wrath
of Purdie (and a flame or two from a certain dutchman ;-).


> I will again refer to the agreement between the OE community and yocto
> for doing the 'merge'.
> 
> If you people (all speaking personally of course) really think poky is the only
> way to go, then please close down and remove the oe-core and bitbake repos.


I see poky as collecting and integrating these projects into a
known-to-work-well-together snapshot. I suppose this is similar to what
the Angstrom setup scripts do, except the fetching is done for you in
poky instead of after the fact in Angstrom. I think this is a more
accurate description than calling them forks.

As I said, this was my personal opinion. RP and Jefro have both
expressed much looser views on what it should mean to be part of the
Yocto Project (and each carry more weight in this discussion than I). So
please don't use my comments as a reason not to pursue becoming "part of
the Yocto Project". As I said, I do not speak in any official capacity
as to what constitutes criteria. "We're just talking here" :-)

OK... time for more medication and some sleep... ugh.

-- 
Darren Hart
Intel Open Source Technology Center
Yocto Project - Linux Kernel