[meta-ti] RFC: creating "extras" layer

[Koen Kooi]

Op 12 jun. 2012, om 09:22 heeft William Mills het volgende geschreven:

> On 06/12/2012 09:44 AM, Koen Kooi wrote:
>> 
>> Op 11 jun. 2012, om 20:17 heeft Denys Dmytriyenko het volgende geschreven:
>> 
>>> Koen, et al,
>>> 
>>> This is a RFC for creating an additional "extras" layer inside meta-ti to
>>> contain pieces and components that are either slightly outdated (i.e. old
>>> Davinci boards, hawk/crane etc.) or have best-effort status (TI81x, anything
>>> DSP-related, etc.) or require non-standard dependencies besides OE-Core
>>> (systemd?) with the possibility of moving them back to "main" meta-ti in the
>>> future, once they become "first-class citizens", i.e. gain current and
>>> continuing support.
>> 
> 
>> If it's going to be split this way I'd like to move all beagleboard.org related things out of meta-ti and into it's own seperate repo.
> 
> We should do whatever makes the most sense and serves all the user's use-cases.  Angstrom beagleboard is an important use case but so is oe-core only on beagleboard and AM335x etc.  We also need people to understand what things are being built and tested every night vs something that was pretty much working when it was tried 6 months ago.
> 
>> If the beagle recipes are demoted to 2nd class citizens we have no incentive anymore to be in meta-ti.
> 
> I thought it was just the older beagleboard stuff that was moving?  Or are you complaining that not every feature of your current builds are available using just oe-core?

I don't have *any* builds that do what they need to do with only oe-core + meta-ti. Till that changes I lack any form of incentive to actively work on oe-core only efforts. I'm not saying that to be mean, just to make my position really clear. 

> It is true that we are trying to do two things here:
> 1) separate things that require layers beyond oe-core
> 2) separate things that are not tested and supported to the same level
> 
> It was your assertion that we did not want too many layers. Unfortunately that means things that require layers beyond oe-core need to be in the second layer.  Sorry if you see that as being a second class citizen.
> 
> There are large parts of beagleboard and beaglebone that do work with only oe-core and are built and tested regularly.  Finding the right place for these pieces should, I think, be the focus of the discussion.
> 
> As I have said before, If you want a seperate layer/repo to support the specifics of Angstrom beagleboard/beaglebone _I_ think that would be fine.

No, in such a scenario I would want all the beagleboard.org stuff removed from meta-ti and have only *one* repo/layer with beagle stuff in it. Doing a split like you say will involve too much extra work to be worth the time and effort. Especially if the 'extras' layer will include all the bitrotted stuff as well.

From a beagleboard.org perspective an oe-core only build is useless at this moment[1], the non-core bits are the ones that make the experience great. I do see that meta-ti needs to support an oe-core only option for their officially supported machines. Since the beagleboard.org boards are not supported by TI it makes sense to move them out and have the beagle layer depend on meta-ti for things like dsp and 3d support.

regards,

Koen

[1] Which of course can change in the future when oe-core gets reworked e.g. move systemd there.