--conf Was: Features in Yocto Project 1.7

[Trevor Woerner <trevor.woerner@linaro.org>]

On 03/24/14 12:00, Richard Purdie wrote:
> I think from my perspective, in 1.7 I'd like to see us looking at
> "Developer Workflow".

Maybe I'm using things incorrectly :-)

But I often find that I'm switching between building different images.
For example, one moment I might be building core-image-minimal (CIM),
then later I'll want to build a GUI image with Wayland.

Switching between CIM and the GUI image requires changes to both
conf/local.conf and conf/bblayers.conf. I will either have two separate
sets of files and symlink between them, or I'll need to edit them by
hand to comment/uncomment out various blocks. I often get this wrong and
will need to restart a couple times before the build can hope to
complete successfully.

If I could wish for one workflow change, it would be the ability to
switch between various build configurations with the minimum of fuss:
- maybe the layer information could be contained within the
configuration file, then on the bitbake cmdline I could just say
"bitbake --conf wayland" or "bitbake --conf mycim" and it would know to
find and use conf/wayland.conf or conf/mycim.conf?
- maybe the local.conf could be renamed wayland.conf and the
bblayers.conf could be renamed wayland.bblayers then I could type
"bitbake --conf wayland" and it would know to look for wayland.conf and
wayland.bblayers?

Does this sort of workflow make sense to others? Or have people noticed
this and solved it in some clever way?