Re: [OE-core] [PATCH 0/1] wic: remove

Mathieu Dubois-Briand
2026-02-09T07:10:24Z

On Mon Feb 9, 2026 at 5:16 AM CET, Trevor Woerner via lists.openembedded.org wrote:
> Previously (Feb 2, 2026) a v2 set of small RFC patches was sent to
> the oe-core mailing list for review[1]. Those emails provided a set of
> small, more easily reviewed, broken-out patches which have the same
> effect as this patch... with one exception: the wic recipe in the RFC
> set of patches pointed to a test wic repository on my personal github
> account and retained none of the wic git history from oe-core. With this
> patch the standalone wic tool has been pushed to git.yoctoproject.org
> and includes the full git history (thanks to git-filter-repo[2]).
>
> No comments or reviews were given on the RFC set, therefore no changes
> have been made since the RFC set except for an update to the wic recipe
> as noted above.
>
> Unfortunately the broken-out RFC patches can not be merged to oe-core
> since individually they will cause build failures. Only once the entire
> set of patches have been applied will everything work again. Therefore
> all of those patches had to be squashed into one larger patch to avoid
> any build breakage.
>
> This patch splits wic out from oe-core into its own standalone tool. The
> wic utility will continue to fall under The Yocto Project umbrella, but
> will no longer be integrated into the project as part of oe-core. The
> ultimate goal is to make wic a completely independent tool, hosted on
> PyPI, with its own tests, development roadmap, and releases.
>
> Some benefits include:
> - relieving the oe-core maintainers from having to review, understand,
> merge, or reject wic patches
> - allow the tool to be used outside of The Yocto Project for generating
> Linux images
> - provide more flexibility to explore other features, libraries,
> mechanisms, etc
>
> The initial task of splitting wic out into its own repository was
> performed with the help of AI. It was checked, and subsequent work was
> done without AI.
>
> These changes have been tested with oe-selftest as follows:
> $ sudo .../layers/openembedded-core/scripts/runqemu-gen-tapdevs <my numeric group id> 4
> $ oe-selftest -v -r wic
>
> The RFC set was run on The Yocto Project AutoBuilder and only one test
> failed: a test from the meta-yocto/meta-yocto-bsp layer. A fix was
> created and sent to the appropriate mailing list for consideration[3].
>
>
> [1] https://lists.openembedded.org/g/openembedded-core/topic/rfc_patch_v2_0_9/117600021
> [2] https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo
> [3] https://lists.yoctoproject.org/g/poky/topic/meta_yocto_bsp_patch/117634997
>
> Trevor Woerner (1):
> wic: remove
>

Hi Trevor,

Thanks for your patch. It is conflicting with a few changes I have in my
mathieu/master-next branch currently, so I can not easily pick it right
now:

39c72286dab9 wic: extra-partition: introduce variable matching sourceparams
799346240452 oeqa/selftest: wic: improve extra-partition plugin tests
2a2085d1d1c2 wic/engine: warn about old host debugfs for standalone directory copy

My opinion is we should try to either drop or merge these patches
quickly, so you can easily rebase on top of master. I will suggest this
during the next patch review meeting, this evening.

Thanks,
Mathieu

--
Mathieu Dubois-Briand, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering