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

[Koehler, Yannick (HPN Aruba)]

So far all reply seems to indicate that the fetching and retrieval of additional layers is not a bitbake problem and should be handled with external tools.

In my view, I fail to see how fetching a layer is different than fetching sources from a particular package.

There is in my opinion two kind of layers people will encounter:

  Private layers:
  Layer own by the current developer and likely to be heavily modified with new recipe of override of existing recipes.

  Vendor layers:
  Third-party layers, which normally should be use as is (without modification).

The case I am mostly interested about is the Vendor layers, if I pull in meta-openembedded or meta-freescale in my yocto distro, I will never touch those layer at the git level, instead whatever change I want will be done in my private layer which is the main reason for layer as I understand it (being able to change other’s vendor layer without changing them).

As such, all bitbake needs is to get a fetch location (SRC_URI) and a path to store the result (S), this is quite similar to a package, except that once the layer has been retrieve and put in place it still need to be updated and parsed.

I fail to see why people would seek a non-bitbake solution such as repo, submodules or others if bitbake was able to do that aspect.  If there is a project already for doing this, I would be interested in participating to its development and I may have one or two helper in my team to help out on this.

For private layers, I do understand and see why an external solution to bitbake would be better, since bitbake will not offer support for branch and change management which is normal as bitbake is only a build tool, not a developer tool.

--
Yannick Koehler

From: yocto-bounces at yoctoproject.org [mailto:yocto-bounces at yoctoproject.org] On Behalf Of Andrea Galbusera
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2017 1:39 AM
To: Trevor Woerner <twoerner at gmail.com>
Cc: yocto at yoctoproject.org
Subject: Re: [yocto] Can Yocto treat layers like an external package?



Il 25 mag 2017 6:12 AM, "Trevor Woerner" <twoerner at gmail.com<mailto:twoerner at gmail.com>> ha scritto:
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 :-)

https://github.com/Wind-River/wr-lx-setup


I'm sure there are other such examples.
--
_______________________________________________
yocto mailing list
yocto at yoctoproject.org<mailto:yocto at yoctoproject.org>
https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/yocto

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.yoctoproject.org/pipermail/yocto/attachments/20170525/a283c6e6/attachment.html>