[poky] Using RPM with Poky

[Mark Hatle]

On 3/21/11 11:35 AM, Gary Thomas wrote:
> On 03/21/2011 09:54 AM, Richard Purdie wrote:
>> On Mon, 2011-03-21 at 09:25 -0600, Gary Thomas wrote:
>>> I'm trying to do some testing with Poky on an atom-PC.  I thought
>>> I'd try with a minimal system and then add pieces I need.  Sadly,
>>> I've run aground doing this.  I've built a couple of images with
>>> varying results:
>>>     poky-image-minimal-live - boots on my box
>>>     poky-image-sato-live - boots, but fails to find X display, then hangs (*)
>>>
>>> There seem to be no RPM tools on the minimal image.  Did I miss something?
>>> On my old, ipk based system, I'd build up a minimal image then use opkg
>>> to install additional packages.
>>
>> Minimal images were never meant to ship with the package manager and now
>> don't. You can obviously change the image definitions easily enough as
>> needed.
>>
>>>    How do I do that with the RPM based images?
>>
>> The same switch turns on/off the package manager data for rpm and opkg.
> 
> I tried adding this to local.conf, but nothing changed when I build minimal image:
>    IMAGE_FEATURES += " package-management ssh-server-dropbear "

I'm really not sure if this is the right fix for the problem.. (Actually I'm
guessing you found an issue, both documentation and functional that it's
difficult to enable this by itself.)

I believe if you add "task-poky-rpm" to the packages to be installed that will
do it.. the problem I'm seeing is I'm not sure how or where you would add that.

The task-poky-rpm is constructed from the task-poky-basic... (I've been building
poky-image-basic recently because it's a step up from "minimal", but yet it
doesn't have the full size of the system like sato.)

> BTW, where is this documented?  Not in the Poky handbook from what I can tell.

We really need to start to document these combinations, magic values, etc...

> Also, is there documentation on how to use zypper, how to set up repositories, etc?

There is no documentation yet on how to use Zypper.  Below is how I've been
using it to test things:

On the host:

1) Build the environment -- full set of rpm packages you want available

2) Build "createrepo-native"

3) Copy tmp/deploy/rpm and contents of somewhere it can be accessed via HTTP,
such as /var/www/html.

4) Create the repository database:

<poky directory>/scripts/poky-setup-rpmrepo /var/www/html/rpm

On the target:

(assuming qemu)

1) zypper addrepo http://192.167.7.1/rpm main

2) zypper refresh

3) zypper install <package>



Some other useful commands:

zypper info <package>

This will give you basic info on a package, and tell you if it's already
installed (@System repository) or which remote repository it's stored in.

zypper remove <package>

This will remove a package, and clean up any other packages that are dependent
upon it.


Note, there are a couple of flaws in the current zypper implementation in
regards to Poky.

The first is that there is a problem on ARM targets.  For some reason it can't
process packages for ARM targets properly.  We're still investigating.

The second is Zypper does not understand RPM dependency hinting at this point.
There is a concept in RPM5 called weak and strong dependencies.  A strong
dependency says that this thing MUST be installed, or its a failure.  A weak
dependency is this thing can be installed, but if it's not we don't fail.
Zypper treats all dependencies equally at this point and assumes they are strong.

--Mark

>>
>>>   I've checked the documentation and there's basically nothing
>>> about this, unless I looked in the wrong place.
>>>
>>> Any ideas or pointers gladly accepted.  Thanks
>>>
>>> (*) I had success with this in the past when I booted with MACHINE=emenlow
>>> but that hardware isn't in the primary list.
>>
>> I'm not sure why this isn't working or what the problem might be...
> 
> It complains it can't find /dev/fb0.  See the boot log at http://www.mlbassoc.com/poky/boot_2011-03-21.log
> 
>>
>> You didn't mention which branch this is with btw.
> 
> master aeaa356a5ee77b4596c479451a9db289381a4d16
> 
> Thanks again
>