[yocto] Questions on HOSTTOOLS and the documented host packages in the manual

[Burton, Ross]

On 10 July 2017 at 12:40, Gunnar Andersson <gandersson at genivi.org> wrote:

> Sidestepping, since I anticipate this in your response:  I know there's
> continuous work on repeatability, and tried to read what I can in the
> manual
> on the new HOSTTOOL variable.  The mechanics of $PATH and softlinking the
> binaries are clear, but I think I missed the intended usage and process
> around it.   First, is it expected/recommended that each layer modifies
> this
> variable?  If so, would layers add new host dependencies, or is the
> intention to have layers further limit this with its own whitelist but
> still
> based on a predefined set coming from the Poky layer?
>

Layers can extend the variables if they have explicit host dependencies,
but I'd be surprised and concerned if this was a common occurrence.

For example I see that meta-oe adds "id" to HOSTTOOLS (for the crash
recipe), but if that was submitted to oe-core it would be rejected.  The
only reason as far as I can tell to call id is to get the current uid/gid,
and that then introduces another vector of non-determinism in builds.  We
recommend that be patched out and replaced with constants: see also the
kernel build which by default uses whoami to embed the username of the
kernel builder, but we export KBUILD_BUILD_USER=oe-user to remove that
source of non-determinism.

Please confirm, is the manual (I refer to the Mega Manual [1]) intended to
> be such a canonical list of host dependencies?
>
> But if so:  Is it intentional or a bug that gzip (and bzip2, perhaps
> others)
> is listed to be installed for Fedora, but not listed to be installed for
> Ubuntu/Debian, see [1]?   Maybe the idea was that some things are always
> there by default on those distros, but that seems brittle.  Shouldn't every
> package be listed very explicitly?
>

Yes, please file a bug for missing ones.  The lists are intended to be
packages installed over the base install, but container images being *very*
minimal are often missing dependencies so we need to be sure everything is
covered.

Ross
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