[yocto] [meta-raspberrypi] Zenity is in meta-gnome

[Trevor Woerner]

On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 12:45 PM, Andrei Gherzan <andrei at gherzan.ro> wrote:
>>> On 2 May 2013 16:12, Trevor Woerner <twoerner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> - a separate tool (which will probably need to be run as root) is used
>>>> to actually format/create the SD device (using, say, sfdisk for
>>>> automation) this way the last partition can be specified as "use the
>>>> rest of the disk"
>>>> - this tool unpacks the requested/required {tar|rpm|deb|ipk}s onto the
>>>> SD device (some of which can come from outside the Yocto build system,
>>>> e.g. from using the SDK); this device already has its
>>>> formatting/partitions ready
>>>> - this tool could also handle setting up serial numbers, IP addresses,
>>>> etc
>>>> - this tools also sets up the bootloader (if required)
>>>
>>>
>
> It always makes sense to create images and deploy it to different file
> types. I don't know why you don't think this is a feature the build system
> should handle.

If you ask the Yocto build system to generate an image for you, there
are no knobs you can tweak :-)

You are "stuck" with a basic FAT+EXTx image, which is all it can
generate for you since it needs to generate this image for you using
tools that don't require root privileges (parted, dd, mcopy...) .
Oddly enough, in some cases the two partitions aren't required;
everything could be done in one, but you get two anyway, because it's
easier to do it that way without root.

What if your product wants/needs a separate "/data" partition that is
2GB in size, and formatted with reiserfs? Is there a knob for that?
What if you want several separate partitions with varying formats? Is
there a simple knob for that? (Honestly I don't know, my understanding
is "no", you only get 2, but maybe someone will surprise me with
"yes"?)


In addition to what I've talked about above, there is a larger
"production" issue that would tie in better with that I propose rather
than with the way things are currently done. You've created your
one-off prototype and it works great. Now you want to ramp up
production and pump out 100's of these things a week. What if each of
your devices needs a unique serial number, or a unique IP address? Are
you really going to try to generate 100's of unique images and hope
your production/manufacturing team "gets it right"? Doing something
like this is not something the build system should handle, this is a
post-build activity.

The tools we have now are fantastic for someone doing one-off
prototypes in their basement, but they don't support the
post-development product phase very well (in my opinion!).