Hello,
On 5/22/26 13:12, Paul Barker wrote:
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 whole difference is far beyond 10 seconds...
This also should include (some, not all) elements in the list of
dependencies (see pn-buildlist from bitbake -g vim[-native]) that will
no longer need to be built.
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?
The only dependency in *oe-core*. My initial concern was other recipes
(namely u-boot @ meta-freescale) that may require xxd. After all, a
realistic list of layers includes more elements than oe-core itself.
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,
I still prefer the "complex" way that keeps xxd as it is (i.e., the same
source code currently used), without far less risk of regressions in
recipes from oe-core and/or 3rd party layers.
--
Best regards,
João Marcos Costa
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