Re: [PATCH] base.bbclass: add support for SOC_FAMILY in COMPATIBLE_MACHINES

[Graeme Gregory <dp@xora.org.uk>]

 On 04/08/10 17:13, Denys Dmytriyenko wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 12:48:38PM +0100, Phil Blundell wrote:
>> On Wed, 2010-08-04 at 13:17 +0200, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
>>> FWIW, minimal is using MACHINE_CLASS since quite a while to
>>> reduce the need for adding the same files over and over again,
>>> this is being used e.g. for HTC msm7 series and OpenEZX series
>>> (see conf/machine/include).
>>>
>>> Perhaps it's time to standardize something like that.
>> Yeah.  I certainly don't think we want a proliferation of such
>> mechanisms.  If minimal is already using MACHINE_CLASS then there would
>> be some sense in trying to make use of the same thing.
>>
>> Failing that though, testing COMPATIBLE_MACHINE against MACHINE_CLASS
>> probably is more desirable than adding a completely new variable (i.e.
>> SOC_FAMILY) for that purpose.
> Phil,
>
> Re: "adding a completely new variable" - SOC_FAMILY has been in use for almost 
> a year now. I'm hearing about MACHINE_CLASS for the first time, although it 
> appears to be slightly older than SOC_FAMILY though. But it doesn't seem to be 
> used anywhere besides in few machine configs and micro.conf. There are no 
> recipes actually using it, unlike SOC_FAMILY...
>
> I'm not saying one is better than the other (actually, unifying them would 
> be nice), I'm just saying it's too late to object adding SOC_FAMILY...
>
As the person who originally added MACHINE_CLASS to openmoko and the OE,
then removed it from OE I can say it has different meaning that
SOC_FAMILY. MACHINE_CLASS was to identify a range of machines that were
90% the same but had a few differences. It was used in a few recipes
which were MACHINE_ARCH to make them use the same ARCH in these recipes
to stop them being rebuilt when switching machines.

The original use was om-gta01 and om-gta02 which had the same MACHINE_CLASS.

Graeme