On 07/08/2014 10:10, Paul Eggleton wrote: > Hi folks, > > As most of you know within the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded we've been > trying to figure out how to improve the OE developer workflow. This > potentially > covers a lot of different areas, but one in particular I where think we can > have some impact is helping application developers - people who are working > on > some application or component of the system, rather than the OS as a whole. > > Currently, what we provide is an installable SDK containing the toolchain, > libraries and headers; we also have the ADT which additionally provides some > Eclipse integration (which I'll leave aside for the moment) and has some > ability to be extended / updated using opkg only. > > The pros: > > * Self contained, no extra dependencies > * Relocatable, can be installed anywhere > * Runs on lots of different systems > * Mostly pre-configured for the desired target machine > > The cons: > > * No ability to migrate into the build environment > * No helper scripts/tools beyond the basic environment setup > * No real upgrade workflow (package feed upgrade possible in theory, but no > tools to help manage the feeds and difficult to scale with multiple releases > and > targets) >
Very interesting Paul. fwiw Upgrade solutions are something that is still a read need imho, as I think we discussed at one of the FOSDEMs. (The other real need being an on-board test framework, again imho, and which I believe is ongoing) Historically I, and I suspect others, have done full image updates of the storage medium, onboard flash or whatever but these images are getting so big now that I am trying to move away from that and into using package feeds for updates to embedded targets. My initial experience has been that - as you mention it would be really helpful to have something "more" around management of package feed releases / targets. - some automation around deployment of package feeds to production servers would help, or at least some documentation on best practice. The other big issue I am seeing, which is mostly my own fault thus far, is that I have sometimes taken the easy option of modifying the root filesystem image in various ways within the image recipe (for example changing a Webmin configuration perhaps) However when I then come to upgrade a package in-situ, such as Webmin, the changes are then overwritten. I think this is probably also an issue when upgrading packages that have had local modifications made, and I wonder whether there's a solution to this that I'm not aware of? I am aware of course that mainstream package management tools allow diffing, upgrading, ignoring and such but I am unsure as to how that is supported under Yocto at present? As a minimum I will have to make sure my OEM recipe changes are all in the correct .bbappends I believe think (more best practice notes there) and I definitely need to understand better how configuration file changes are handled when upgrading packages. Cheers, Alex -- _______________________________________________ yocto mailing list yocto@yoctoproject.org https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/yocto
