[yocto] Criteria for proposing a host distribution supported

[Paul Barker]

On 26 July 2013 11:57, Laszlo Papp <lpapp at kde.org> wrote:
> Actually, I also have problems with Debian stable? See the bugreports I
> sent. It is mentioned as "supported distribution". Yet, it does not work. I
> do not to follow the parallelism with Arch accordingly.

The cost of supporting a distro will be dependent on the rate and
magnitude of changes within that distro. Arch has large, frequent
updates to core packages and so would have to be re-tested almost
continuously. "Stable" releases of many distros limit how and when
they will update things like gcc, binutils, etc and try not to
introduce backwards-incompatible changes. Such things still slip
through, but they are rare, so OE/Yocto can cope with the developer
time needed to get the problem fixed. Supporting a rolling-release
distro which follows the latest toolchain updates would essentially be
an open-ended commitment.

> People can always revert the offending arch package to one week older if
> they wanna use Yocto, or they can fix it. I do not see it a problem, and
> easily solvable, especially with a clear CI documentation which should
> happen for any node, anyhow.

So we'd have to say "Arch Linux, with xxx version of gcc, yyy version
of binutils, etc" was supported, not just "Arch Linux". How many
packages do we specify the version of?

> The problem is currently that there is no any focus on Arch

This is incorrect. Just because there Arch isn't "supported" doesn't
mean no-one cares about it. When the sanity check for a broken make
3.82 was added to OE, I put in a bug report to Arch
(https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/35968) and it got fixed.

-- 
Paul Barker

Email: paul at paulbarker.me.uk
http://www.paulbarker.me.uk