[yocto] RFC: Post build configuration

[Sean Liming]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Trevor Woerner [mailto:twoerner at gmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, April 08, 2013 1:28 PM
> To: Sean Liming
> Cc: Venkata ramana gollamudi; yocto at yoctoproject.org; Sanil kumar
> Subject: Re: [yocto] RFC: Post build configuration
> 
> 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).

Excellent. That makes a lot of sense. Is this post-build utility an active
project for the Yocto Project or is it just getting started?  Is it a menu
driven item / something that we can include via a layer?

Regards,

Sean Liming