Adding extra metadata to Yocto/Poky

Adding extra metadata to Yocto/Poky

[Richard Purdie]

Hi,

We're in a position where we have people wanting to extend Poky but
wondering exactly how to add their own layer and make Poky useful for
their specific use cases.

This is a topic I want to work with the OE community on and have
discussion about but equally, people are interested at the moment and we
need something people can experiment with now so we can see what works
and what doesn't.

With this in mind I'm proposing we create a "poky-extras" repository
which contains multiple user contributed layers.

My proposed ground rules are:

* it has the OE style open contributions model
* consists of a set of layers, each clearly identified at the top level
* each layer has a clearly named maintainer or maintainers
* people respect the layer maintainers
* layers are split into logical "topics" where at all possible

Ultimately, the repo structure and some of the details could change but
I'd like to experiment and see what we can come up with which is
probably the only way we're going to move forward.

Any comments, objections or better ideas? :)

Cheers,

Richard

Re: Adding extra metadata to Yocto/Poky

[Chris Larson]

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 5:49 AM, Richard Purdie <rpurdie@linux.intel.com> wrote:
> We're in a position where we have people wanting to extend Poky but
> wondering exactly how to add their own layer and make Poky useful for
> their specific use cases.
>
> This is a topic I want to work with the OE community on and have
> discussion about but equally, people are interested at the moment and we
> need something people can experiment with now so we can see what works
> and what doesn't.
>
> With this in mind I'm proposing we create a "poky-extras" repository
> which contains multiple user contributed layers.
>
> My proposed ground rules are:
>
> * it has the OE style open contributions model
> * consists of a set of layers, each clearly identified at the top level
> * each layer has a clearly named maintainer or maintainers
> * people respect the layer maintainers
> * layers are split into logical "topics" where at all possible
>
> Ultimately, the repo structure and some of the details could change but
> I'd like to experiment and see what we can come up with which is
> probably the only way we're going to move forward.
>
> Any comments, objections or better ideas? :)

This seems fine to me as an area to hash out good practices and
experiment, as long as we don't expect to use this structure long
term.  It makes sense for the core layers to be in one repo, but it
makes more sense to use one git repository per external layer, imo.
Is that the intent, or am I misunderstanding its purpose?
-- 
Christopher Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Senior Software Engineer, Mentor Graphics

Re: [poky] Adding extra metadata to Yocto/Poky

[Chris Larson]

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 5:49 AM, Richard Purdie <rpurdie@linux.intel.com> wrote:
> We're in a position where we have people wanting to extend Poky but
> wondering exactly how to add their own layer and make Poky useful for
> their specific use cases.
>
> This is a topic I want to work with the OE community on and have
> discussion about but equally, people are interested at the moment and we
> need something people can experiment with now so we can see what works
> and what doesn't.
>
> With this in mind I'm proposing we create a "poky-extras" repository
> which contains multiple user contributed layers.
>
> My proposed ground rules are:
>
> * it has the OE style open contributions model
> * consists of a set of layers, each clearly identified at the top level
> * each layer has a clearly named maintainer or maintainers
> * people respect the layer maintainers
> * layers are split into logical "topics" where at all possible
>
> Ultimately, the repo structure and some of the details could change but
> I'd like to experiment and see what we can come up with which is
> probably the only way we're going to move forward.
>
> Any comments, objections or better ideas? :)

This seems fine to me as an area to hash out good practices and
experiment, as long as we don't expect to use this structure long
term.  It makes sense for the core layers to be in one repo, but it
makes more sense to use one git repository per external layer, imo.
Is that the intent, or am I misunderstanding its purpose?
-- 
Christopher Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Senior Software Engineer, Mentor Graphics

Re: Adding extra metadata to Yocto/Poky

[Richard Purdie]

On Wed, 2010-12-08 at 07:08 -0700, Chris Larson wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 5:49 AM, Richard Purdie <rpurdie@linux.intel.com> wrote:
> > We're in a position where we have people wanting to extend Poky but
> > wondering exactly how to add their own layer and make Poky useful for
> > their specific use cases.
> >
> > This is a topic I want to work with the OE community on and have
> > discussion about but equally, people are interested at the moment and we
> > need something people can experiment with now so we can see what works
> > and what doesn't.
> >
> > With this in mind I'm proposing we create a "poky-extras" repository
> > which contains multiple user contributed layers.
> >
> > My proposed ground rules are:
> >
> > * it has the OE style open contributions model
> > * consists of a set of layers, each clearly identified at the top level
> > * each layer has a clearly named maintainer or maintainers
> > * people respect the layer maintainers
> > * layers are split into logical "topics" where at all possible
> >
> > Ultimately, the repo structure and some of the details could change but
> > I'd like to experiment and see what we can come up with which is
> > probably the only way we're going to move forward.
> >
> > Any comments, objections or better ideas? :)
> 
> This seems fine to me as an area to hash out good practices and
> experiment, as long as we don't expect to use this structure long
> term.  It makes sense for the core layers to be in one repo, but it
> makes more sense to use one git repository per external layer, imo.
> Is that the intent, or am I misunderstanding its purpose?

That is the intent but we don't currently have the tooling to make repos
per external layer work nicely for the end user (not that I think its
too hard to create). This repo give us a way to experiment with
splitting things up whilst still not hurting the end user experience too
much.

So its not the final solution, just what I think might be a good way to
start hashing things out.

Cheers,

Richard

Re: [poky] Adding extra metadata to Yocto/Poky

[Richard Purdie]

On Wed, 2010-12-08 at 07:08 -0700, Chris Larson wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 5:49 AM, Richard Purdie <rpurdie@linux.intel.com> wrote:
> > We're in a position where we have people wanting to extend Poky but
> > wondering exactly how to add their own layer and make Poky useful for
> > their specific use cases.
> >
> > This is a topic I want to work with the OE community on and have
> > discussion about but equally, people are interested at the moment and we
> > need something people can experiment with now so we can see what works
> > and what doesn't.
> >
> > With this in mind I'm proposing we create a "poky-extras" repository
> > which contains multiple user contributed layers.
> >
> > My proposed ground rules are:
> >
> > * it has the OE style open contributions model
> > * consists of a set of layers, each clearly identified at the top level
> > * each layer has a clearly named maintainer or maintainers
> > * people respect the layer maintainers
> > * layers are split into logical "topics" where at all possible
> >
> > Ultimately, the repo structure and some of the details could change but
> > I'd like to experiment and see what we can come up with which is
> > probably the only way we're going to move forward.
> >
> > Any comments, objections or better ideas? :)
> 
> This seems fine to me as an area to hash out good practices and
> experiment, as long as we don't expect to use this structure long
> term.  It makes sense for the core layers to be in one repo, but it
> makes more sense to use one git repository per external layer, imo.
> Is that the intent, or am I misunderstanding its purpose?

That is the intent but we don't currently have the tooling to make repos
per external layer work nicely for the end user (not that I think its
too hard to create). This repo give us a way to experiment with
splitting things up whilst still not hurting the end user experience too
much.

So its not the final solution, just what I think might be a good way to
start hashing things out.

Cheers,

Richard

Re: Adding extra metadata to Yocto/Poky

[Darren Hart]

On 12/08/2010 04:49 AM, Richard Purdie wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We're in a position where we have people wanting to extend Poky but
> wondering exactly how to add their own layer and make Poky useful for
> their specific use cases.
>
> This is a topic I want to work with the OE community on and have
> discussion about but equally, people are interested at the moment and we
> need something people can experiment with now so we can see what works
> and what doesn't.
>
> With this in mind I'm proposing we create a "poky-extras" repository
> which contains multiple user contributed layers.
>
> My proposed ground rules are:
>
> * it has the OE style open contributions model
> * consists of a set of layers, each clearly identified at the top level
> * each layer has a clearly named maintainer or maintainers
> * people respect the layer maintainers
> * layers are split into logical "topics" where at all possible
>
> Ultimately, the repo structure and some of the details could change but
> I'd like to experiment and see what we can come up with which is
> probably the only way we're going to move forward.
>
> Any comments, objections or better ideas? :)

Sounds like a good approach to me. What would the expectation of 
"lifecycle" be? Will these layers move to the poky git repository after 
some proven time to join things like meta-linaro and meta-demo (which 
should be renamed meta-dlna) or should we move these layers to 
poky-extras too?

-- 
Darren Hart
Yocto Linux Kernel

Re: [poky] Adding extra metadata to Yocto/Poky

[Darren Hart]

On 12/08/2010 04:49 AM, Richard Purdie wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We're in a position where we have people wanting to extend Poky but
> wondering exactly how to add their own layer and make Poky useful for
> their specific use cases.
>
> This is a topic I want to work with the OE community on and have
> discussion about but equally, people are interested at the moment and we
> need something people can experiment with now so we can see what works
> and what doesn't.
>
> With this in mind I'm proposing we create a "poky-extras" repository
> which contains multiple user contributed layers.
>
> My proposed ground rules are:
>
> * it has the OE style open contributions model
> * consists of a set of layers, each clearly identified at the top level
> * each layer has a clearly named maintainer or maintainers
> * people respect the layer maintainers
> * layers are split into logical "topics" where at all possible
>
> Ultimately, the repo structure and some of the details could change but
> I'd like to experiment and see what we can come up with which is
> probably the only way we're going to move forward.
>
> Any comments, objections or better ideas? :)

Sounds like a good approach to me. What would the expectation of 
"lifecycle" be? Will these layers move to the poky git repository after 
some proven time to join things like meta-linaro and meta-demo (which 
should be renamed meta-dlna) or should we move these layers to 
poky-extras too?

-- 
Darren Hart
Yocto Linux Kernel