Re: [PATCH] base.bbclass: add support for SOC_FAMILY in COMPATIBLE_MACHINES

[Denys Dmytriyenko <denis@denix.org>]

On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 05:59:30PM +0100, Graeme Gregory wrote:
>  On 04/08/10 17:13, Denys Dmytriyenko wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 12:48:38PM +0100, Phil Blundell wrote:
> >> On Wed, 2010-08-04 at 13:17 +0200, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
> >>> FWIW, minimal is using MACHINE_CLASS since quite a while to
> >>> reduce the need for adding the same files over and over again,
> >>> this is being used e.g. for HTC msm7 series and OpenEZX series
> >>> (see conf/machine/include).
> >>>
> >>> Perhaps it's time to standardize something like that.
> >> Yeah.  I certainly don't think we want a proliferation of such
> >> mechanisms.  If minimal is already using MACHINE_CLASS then there would
> >> be some sense in trying to make use of the same thing.
> >>
> >> Failing that though, testing COMPATIBLE_MACHINE against MACHINE_CLASS
> >> probably is more desirable than adding a completely new variable (i.e.
> >> SOC_FAMILY) for that purpose.
> > Phil,
> >
> > Re: "adding a completely new variable" - SOC_FAMILY has been in use for almost 
> > a year now. I'm hearing about MACHINE_CLASS for the first time, although it 
> > appears to be slightly older than SOC_FAMILY though. But it doesn't seem to be 
> > used anywhere besides in few machine configs and micro.conf. There are no 
> > recipes actually using it, unlike SOC_FAMILY...
> >
> > I'm not saying one is better than the other (actually, unifying them would 
> > be nice), I'm just saying it's too late to object adding SOC_FAMILY...
> >
> As the person who originally added MACHINE_CLASS to openmoko and the OE,
> then removed it from OE I can say it has different meaning that
> SOC_FAMILY. MACHINE_CLASS was to identify a range of machines that were
> 90% the same but had a few differences. It was used in a few recipes
> which were MACHINE_ARCH to make them use the same ARCH in these recipes
> to stop them being rebuilt when switching machines.
> 
> The original use was om-gta01 and om-gta02 which had the same MACHINE_CLASS.

Graeme,

Thanks for clarifying this! Do you still see a benefit in using MACHINE_CLASS? 
Why was it removed from OE? I don't see why it can't be used alongside 
SOC_FAMILY...

-- 
Denys