[yocto] Can Yocto treat layers like an external package?

[Trevor Woerner]

Hi Yannick,

This is a feature many people have been wanting for a while, but
getting there has been slow. So slow, in fact, that many projects have
simply gone ahead and implemented their own solutions, all of which
are different from each other, making it all that much harder to get
everyone back together to support one idea :-(

As Gary mentions, "repo" is a popular solution. See, for example, how
the Linaro people have done it with their "rpb" distro and associated
setup tools/scripts:

https://github.com/96boards/oe-rpb-manifest

The freescale project was the first such instance I saw (but I can't
say whether they were the first or not):

https://github.com/Freescale/fsl-community-bsp-platform
http://freescale.github.io/#download

Mark Hatle (windriver) has been working on and releasing a tool
they've been using internally for a while:

https://www.openembedded.org/wiki/OEDEM_2016#Windriver_.E2.80.98setup.E2.80.99_Demo

I'm sure there are better links for Mark's work, but I can't find them
at the moment. Hopefully someone jumps in and fills in the blanks :-)

I'm sure there are other such examples.