On Thu, 2026-05-21 at 14:58 +0200, Joao Marcos Costa via
lists.openembedded.org wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Honestly, my main motivation to send this series comes from a time when
> I was building u-boot (meta-freescale) and I saw vim-native in Bitbake's
> tasks. It blew my mind that a bootloader somehow dependend on a text
> editor (yes, only to be built, not to be executed, I know), and the whole
> text editor was being built to provide nothing more than xxd.
> 
> Just to be clear, what bothers me is NOT u-boot depending on xxd. It is
> actually configuring and compiling Vim (considering the overhead this
> represents) only to use a single tiny piece of it.
> 
> As for the tests I performed:
> 
> - machine: qemuriscv64
> - toolchains: clang and gcc
> - classes (xxd, vim-xxd): target, native, nativesdk
> - classes (vim): target, native, nativesdk
> - archiving: the resulting tarball includes only xxd's sources, as expected
> 
> Some benchmarks as well, from a previous mail:
> 
> vim-native-9.2.0340-r0: do_configure
> Elapsed time: 6.81 seconds
> 
> vim-native-9.2.0340-r0: do_compile
> Elapsed time: 4.43 seconds
> 
> vim-xxd-native-9.2.0340-r0: do_configure
> Elapsed time: 0.03 seconds
> 
> vim-xxd-native-9.2.0340-r0: do_compile
> Elapsed time: 0.23 seconds
> 
> (this data comes from tmp/buildstats)

I appreciate the effort here, but I don't think the ~10 seconds saved
during the build justifies the extra complexity in the recipes.

The only dependency on xxd in OE-core is from the dosfsutils ptest. Have
we tried running those tests using busybox xxd? If that lacks support
for one or two arguments we need it to handle, have we considered
submitting patches to busybox to support these?

Alternatively, we could look at tinyxxd [1]. This is based on xxd from
vim with a few improvements, as a standalone repo.

[1]: https://github.com/xyproto/tinyxxd

Either of those two options would isolate xxd from vim completely,
unblocking removal of vim from OE-core.

Best regards,

-- 
Paul Barker

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