[yocto] RFC: Post build configuration

[Trevor Woerner]

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:42 PM, Sean Liming <sean.liming at annabooks.com> wrote:
> Why post-build instead of pre-build?

The idea is that you have one build, and you are manufacturing 5000 devices.

So you take this one build and load it on each of your identical
devices which you then sell to your customers. But if each device you
sell is supposed to have a unique piece of configuration information,
you don't want to have to create 5000 builds, one for each device, do
you? In other words, this unique data shouldn't be part of the build,
you wouldn't want to have to start a new build just because you want
to change this unique data?

Ideally you would create one build. Then, just before loading this
build onto a given device, you do something to set this unique piece
of information (i.e. post-build) for this one device, then you repeat
for the remaining 4999 devices.

The assumption here is that builds are "expensive" (i.e. slow) while
post-build configuration would be "cheap" (i.e. quick, easy, fast).