On 10/17/23 7:48 PM, Khem Raj wrote:
Hi All
Here is a proposal for deprecation policy for recipes and related
metadata maintained in layers under meta-openembedded repository
Once this is reviewed and adopted, it can be adopted for other layers
too if given layer maintainers find it useful. These points have been
discussed over yocto TSC and this is initial version for review.
This would be added to OE wiki once we have discussed it over here.
I agree, most layers could benefit from a more specific policy like this. Using
meta-openembedded as a 'best practices' case will help others.
As for the guidelines above, I agree with the criteria and process steps listed.
I am involved in the Yocto TSC on behalf of OpenEmbedded, so I believe this does
further the needs of the OpenEmbeeded Community as well as the needs of the
Yocto Project.
--Mark
Why:
- Reduce the security gap
- Increase quality of layer and recipes
- Reduce technical debt
- Improved developer productivity
Challenges:
Obsolete code adds to maintenance burden.
Old code consumes developers’ time which could be better focused elsewhere
Can’t tell who is using things
Sometimes recipes are one-off contributions which are unmaintained
there might be a perception that obsolete/removed recipes from OE-Core
can be added to meta-oe
Users aren’t often paying attention to development branches, only
release branches
Full meta-openembedded builds consume significant resources. Long builds
slow down development and narrows down testing matrix
Obsolete recipes adds inertia towards new developments
Older/obsolete recipes tend to become of poorer quality more so over
time as they are either not brought to use latest stuff or are simply
missing it.
Keeping this in sight, here is a proposal to define some guidelines for
community to assess recipe deprecation
Deprecation guideline criteria:
- Recipe is not buildable
- Recipe has known security issues (particularly high impact ones)
- package's upstream is not actively responding to build or security
issues (e.g. a large patch backlog)
- Functionality from recipe has been obsoleted by other recipes and no
longer commonly used
- Recipe has no activity upstream (no activity for e.g. 5+ years is a
concern)
- Recipe with many architecture exclusions and isn’t portable but not
hardware specific recipe
- It is not a key dependency for large set of recipes/layers (check
layer index using depends:[recipename])
- Niche specific recipe may better moved to a more focused topic layer
- Poor quality recipe or recipe build environment with no maintainer
willing to improve
- Recipe has problematic host dependencies (e.g. 32-bit runtime) and no
maintainer improving situation
Process:
- Maintainer can remove if the decision is clear to them and has
discretion over the process
- For unclear situations, exclude from parsing initially with reason
documented
- Notification is in the form of a patch adding the exclusion
- After a reasonable time if not fixed, recipe is removed
- Recipe removals scheduled after each release point
- If someone addresses the underlying issues the recipe can be added
back or have parsing re-enabled.
- If there is a conflict, issue can be raised to OE TSC for a decision
Feedback is welcome
-Khem
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