Hi there, As some of you may know, BitBake has a module under lib/bb called "tinfoil" which you can use to create simple Python utilities that can call into BitBake code - for example, you can get variable values and parse recipes. Several utilities shipped with BitBake/OE make use of this (e.g. bitbake-layers, oe- pkgdata-util, devtool, etc.). The OE layer index and Recipe Reporting Service update scripts also use it.
One of tinfoil's limitations up to now is that it bypasses BitBake's client- server model - it only starts up the server, and it initialises the server only partially. This is fine for what it needs to do, but it does mean that scripts that use it cannot be run when BitBake is running in memory resident mode - there can be only one server instance per TMPDIR. Recently I've been trying to address that by moving tinfoil to the client side; my WIP branch is here: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky-contrib/log/?h=paule/tinfoil2 There are some other benefits to moving to this model: * We can now connect an actual UI, thus you get things like the recipe parsing progress bar and parse error handling for free * We can now handle events generated by the server - in the OE layer index for example, I'm pretty certain the lack of this is the source of a bug where we leak memory. (Note - this is still todo on my branch). * We can potentially extend this to do more stuff, e.g. actually running build operations - that simply wasn't possible with tinfoil before. I haven't actually provided any specific access to this yet but it shouldn't be too hard. The downside is that tinfoil no longer has direct access to cooker, the global datastore, and the cache. I have extended data_smart to provide remote access capability for the datastore, and created "fake" cooker and cooker.recipecache / cooker.collection adapter objects in order to avoid breaking too many tinfoil-using scripts that might be out there (we've never officially documented tinfoil or bitbake's internal code, but we can still make accommodations where practical). I've at least gone far enough to support bitbake-layers with some changes, but I know there are scripts such as Chris's "bb" out there that do make other calls into BitBake code that I'm not providing access to through the adapters (yet?). However, it struck me that we have an opportunity to create a proper API this time rather than simply exposing the internals of BitBake (which do occasionally change, and that has resulted in breakage of tinfoil-using scripts in the past). The datastore is probably fine to expose, but parts of cooker and the cache would probably be better represented as methods on tinfoil, object structures underneath it, or simply as client/server calls that can be accessed through runCommand() (with the current architecture, we need to add the latter anyway). Once we've set up the new API, we can then document it. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I'm particularly interested in hearing from people using tinfoil in their own scripts or who would be interested in writing such scripts in the future - what kind of API would you like to have? Thanks, Paul -- Paul Eggleton --------------------------------------------------------------------- Intel Corporation (UK) Limited Registered No. 1134945 (England) Registered Office: Pipers Way, Swindon SN3 1RJ VAT No: 860 2173 47 -- _______________________________________________ Openembedded-core mailing list Openembedded-core@lists.openembedded.org http://lists.openembedded.org/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-core