Re: [oe-commits] org.oe.dev rootfs_ipk: as per OE policy: remove feed management tools

[Richard Purdie <rpurdie@rpsys.net>]

Hi,

On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 17:23 +0100, Koen Kooi wrote:
> Michael 'Mickey' Lauer schreef:
> > koen commit wrote:
> >> rootfs_ipk: as per OE policy: remove feed management tools
> > 
> > Guys, please don't play games. Since it is a handy feature indeed,
> > can we perhaps agree on making this a seperate bbclass to keep both of
> > you satisfied?

Mickey has a point here. There are a number of people upset by the
recent deploy directory changes. I would like a calm rational discussion
to take place before any further commits are made on this subject.

Personally, I'm currently undecided. I'd like to hear more from both
sides. If there is a convincing reason for breaking deploy as a feed
behaviour, I'm listening. If we can use deploy as a feed and just need
to fix some broken tools, we should consider allowing that (even if its
a case of user beware and not officially supported).

Moving on to Koen's comments:

> All feed management was removed a long time ago from OE because
> 
> a) it's out of scope
> b) can't be done right in an automated fashion

Can you explain b) a bit more?

> And after discovering some bugs in ipkg-utils a while ago it seems you have to manually
> munge the Packages file to get something that ipkg will handle correctly when upgrading stuff.

Does this not mean we need to fix ipkg or ipkg-utils? Can you explain
what the problem is as a lot of people would like to know. We might even
the find someone to fix it...

> So whichever way you look at it it's going to add broken behaviour to OE. I don't want to
> explain to users why their 'feeds' don't work because they disabled common sense because
> 'OE generated it'.
>
> But but but but but... OE generates feeds now as well!! Right, deploy/ipk contains
> subdirectories people could abuse as feeds if they want, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Something a little more technical would be good here. 

We have a spectrum of users with differing abilities. I do things I'd
not recommend people did all the time. In a lot of those cases, if
someone's patches stopped me doing them for no good reason, I'd want to
fix that.

> So *if* people *need* OE to generate feeds, there you have them. However, I strongly
> oppose adding know broken behaviour to satisfy lazy people.

What is this known broken behaviour you keep talking about?

I will add that feed generation is something that most OE users have to
deal with at some point. It would be nice to have a wiki page or
something showing some best practise in managing them. I know I'll have
to face this with poky at some point and others are in a similar
position. I don't think feed management should dictate how OE's
directory structure works but I'm also not sure saying feed management
is something external is a good idea either since we're all going to
have to deal with it at some point.

Cheers,

Richard