Re: [PATCH 2/2] uninative: Switch from bz2 to xz

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>]

On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 09:13:02AM +0100, richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org wrote:
>...
> I'm torn, partly as if we stick with bz2, we effectively do that
> perpetually and given the size difference, we should switch.
> 
> Tim mentions we could fix the crops container and I'm tempted to switch
> given we're so close with the current patchset...
> 
> We can add xz to HOSTTOOLS in master and that makes sense for a number
> of other reasons but gets tricky as we can't add it to ASSUME_PROVIDED
> as easily due to the libs it provides. I think we only need to worry
> about this on master though.

There are also some other related topics that might be considered
on how this should develop long-term:

1. How important is it to support host distributions that are not 
listed as supported? Not limited to uninative it can be painful
adding support for new distributions to stable branches.

2. Does using uninative by default bring enough benefits to outweight 
the problems with new host distributions, or should it become 
non-default in master?

The sum of the two points above is especially problematic:
"re-use of native shared state artifacts across different host 
distributions" is a more exotic feature, and effectively supporting
this for unsupported host distributions is the problem here.

3. uninative is so fragile because it tries to fix the C library
only. A lot of problems with host distributions (not limited to
uninative) would go away if one host distribution would be picked
and provided as container for people who are using other distributions.

> Cheers,
> 
> Richard

cu
Adrian

-- 

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