Re: [RFC] Initial Proposal for Packaged Staging Revamp (was [RFC] Make some big changes right after next stable)

[Phil Blundell <philb@gnu.org>]

On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 10:09 -0700, Chris Larson wrote:
> To summarize, I propose the creation of an archive/package which acts as the
> primary artifact to come out of the build of a recipe.  By capturing *all*
> output of a recipe into a single place, we reduce confusion and make things
> easier to track.  Every subsequent task by the recipe (or other recipes)
> will go based on this archive (or cached, extracted contents of this
> archive, for performance).  Builds from cached binaries would operate based
> on this archive, so that the execution of the subsequent tasks would be
> identical between the prebuilt and from scratch cases, and it makes it clear
> that this is not just "packaged staging" in concept or intent.

Yes, this is pretty much what I have been thinking of as well.  I think
the only real difference between what you have suggested here and what I
have had mind is that I was originally planning to re-use the existing
binary package output (i.e. what you get from do_package) to populate
the staging directory.  The nice thing about that approach is that it
guarantees that you will get the same result for an in-tree OE build
compared to an on-target build against the installed -dev packages,
which would help to avoid some of the issues we have had in the past
with the -dev packages being defective through lack of testing.

Indeed, one of the main motivations for the work that I have been doing
on the toolchain-desuck branch is to remove the special-casing of the
toolchain recipes so that they just generate output packages which you
can then install in the same way as anything else.

Introducing a new archive format which captures the entirety of the
build output up to and including do_install is indeed quite tempting as
well, though.

p.