On 11/16/11 4:07 PM, Jeff Osier-Mixon wrote:
Mark Hatle said:
Yocto is a cross-compiled build environment. This is a departure to a lot of
the Moblin/MeeGo work that has occurred in the past. The advantages are you
can use any commodity PC to target any (supported) architecture.
Disadvantages are that when you introduce new code, you need to ensure that
it has a recipe (build instructions for bitbake) and can cross compile. If
everyone has to do the same work over and over, this can be time consuming
and counter productive. If people work together, the time and support burden
are dramatically reduced. This can help negate issues people have had in the
past with cross compiling. Note: Yocto -does- have a self hosted compile
environment if it is needed, this is usually when cross compiling isn't easy
to do for some reason.
Mark & everyone else listening:
Would you say that (1) the need for a recipe and (2) the requirement to
cross-compile are two of the most major usability or learning-curve
disadvantages of working with the Yocto Project (and oe-core)? What would be a
third disadvantage from a usability standpoint?
1) Recipe isn't needed, unless you want automatically reproduced builds and to
share the instructions with others... which is one our our goals.
I don't see the recipe as anything different then an SRPM, Debian src.tgz, etc.
The only obstacle is that it's "different" that what desktop distributions do.
2) I think cross compilation is by far the largest obstacle. People not
familiar with the GNU auto tools, cross compiling in general, or simply
inexperienced developers seem to have a lot of problems with this. I think
OE/Yocto does a good job at providing GNU auto tools and make helpers, but it's
far from perfect. As far as how to improve it... we need to keep incrementally
improving our support, documentations and examples. We also need to foster a
community where people share the work they've already done... thus eliminating
this issue. (The meta-oe layer is a good place for this already.)
I'm sure there are other usability issues, but I've been doing cross compilation
for so long that I'm a bit blind to some of the issues.
To me the biggest thing we need to do is make sure someone who is familiar with
desktop Linux can step in and apply what they know to building a recipe and
fixing cross compilation problems. If we can do that -- it will go a long way
toward helping resolve the issues that cause people to do self-hosted
compilation on slow target systems. (Note there are some things that are simply
complicated and difficult to do like Firefox.. for those the only answer is to
have "experts" do the work and make it available to the novices so they can see
and understand how to work around various issues.)
Another way to put it: if you could change three things about the Yocto Project
to make it more approachable for someone who has never used it before, what
would they be?
To re-iterate:
*) We need a resource for contributed packages (meta-oe?) that will eliminate
most of the problem.
*) We need good examples of problems and solutions to cross compilation
difficulties
*) We need to continue to identify "common" issues and work to resolve them in
the tooling we already support
--Mark
--
Jeff Osier-Mixon http://jefro.net/blog
Yocto Project Community Manager @Intel http://yoctoproject.org
<http://yoctoproject.org/>
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