i think the list of "required software" needs to be clarified

i think the list of "required software" needs to be clarified

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i know i've mentioned this before, but it's still somewhat confusing
if a new yocto user wants to figure out *exactly* what he or she must
install manually on a yocto development host.

  there are a pile of web pages that claim to explain this:

http://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/latest/yocto-project-qs/yocto-project-qs.html
http://www.openembedded.org/index.php?title=OEandYourDistro
http://www.openembedded.org/index.php?title=Required_software
http://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/1.4/ref-manual/ref-manual.html#required-packages-for-the-host-development-system

but they're inconsistent, and the bigger issue is this in
bitbake.conf:

  ASSUME_PROVIDED = "\
    bzip2-native \
    chrpath-native \
    git-native \
    grep-native \
    diffstat-native \
    patch-native \
    perl-native-runtime \
    python-native-runtime \
    tar-native \
    virtual/libintl-native \
    "
  # gzip-native should be listed above?

it would *seem* that, for efficiency, the build process should take
far more advantage of already-installed native packages. the above
list is kind of weird in its selective inconsistency -- why is git
there but not subversion? why is bzip2 but (as you can read) not gzip?

  in addition, some of the above links insist that you need to
install (for instance) m4, but it's obvious that m4 is going to be
downloaded and built for you.  the same with quilt, i believe.

  anyway, you get the idea. i think it was tom z(?) who explained once
that downloading and building even some natively-installed tools made
Q/A easier, and that's certainly true. but it would also be useful,
for efficiency, to at least *suggest* to readers what native tools
they might take advantage of, with a minimum supported version of
each.

  thoughts?

rday

-- 

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
========================================================================

Re: i think the list of "required software" needs to be clarified

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i just found an old thread that i was in:

http://lists.linuxtogo.org/pipermail/openembedded-core/2012-July/025402.html

i do notice what seems to be an inconsistency.  from bitbake.conf:

ASSUME_PROVIDED = "\
    bzip2-native \
    chrpath-native \
    git-native \
    grep-native \
    diffstat-native \
    patch-native \
    perl-native-runtime \
    python-native-runtime \
    tar-native \
    virtual/libintl-native \
    "
# gzip-native should be listed above?

  so gzip is listed here as questionable, but seems to be essential
based on sanity.bbclass:

SANITY_REQUIRED_UTILITIES ?= "patch diffstat makeinfo git bzip2 tar
gzip gawk chrpath wget cpio"

  does that not seem a touch inconsistent?

rday

-- 

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
========================================================================

Re: i think the list of "required software" needs to be clarified

[Rudolf Streif]

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In a sense yes. From how I understand it, anything that is listed as a
required utility in SANITY_REQUIRED_UTILITIES does not even have to be
listed in ASSUME_PROVIDED. The required native utilites should fail the
sanity test right away if they are not there.

For any dependency listed in ASSUME_PROVIDED BitBake will not attempt to
build it. But for instance, even if you do not list "tar-native" in
ASSUME_PROVIDED there is no way for BitBake to build tar since the recipe's
SRC_URI points to a tarball. Catch22.

However, I would expect that all the build essentials (awk make wget tar
bzip2 gzip python unzip perl patch diffutils diffstat git cpp gcc gcc-c++
eglibc-devel texinfo chrpath ccache) are listed in
SANITY_REQUIRED_UTILITIES.

A reason I could see to list all of the required native utilities in
ASSUME_PROVIDED could be the dependency graphs. It does not really add any
value to show the native stuff in the graphs.

:rjs

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Patch version gotchas (was Re: i think the list of "required software" needs to be clarified)

[Tim Bird]

On 04/09/2013 06:10 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> SANITY_REQUIRED_UTILITIES ?= "patch diffstat makeinfo git bzip2 tar
> gzip gawk chrpath wget cpio"

This is just a generic warning on the subject of native patch.
We recently had a discussion on the LTSI-dev mailing list about
patch.  It seems that some patches produced by git now require
a later version of patch than was shipped in relatively recent
platforms(e.g. Ubuntu 12.04 shipped with patch 2.6.1)

Based on this, at Sony we intended to switch over to patch 2.7
(which has explicit support for "diff --git" format)
Unfortunately, we found that some of our patches were not compatible
with this version of patch, and thus found ourselves in
a pickle.  We now have to switch between patch versions, depending
on the project and set of patches we're working on.

=============================
Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Workgroup of the Linux Foundation
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Network Entertainment
=============================