On Tue, 2011-05-17 at 13:57 -0700, Khem Raj wrote: > With default-setup being pulled in via bitbake.conf and task-core-boot > being pulled into all images in distros, we need > to have some variables that distro's can override if need be > This is a backport from angstrom/OE. It will help distros which > e.g. would like to use busybox-mdev instead of udev and similarly > for login manager these variables can be defined in distro policies
I'm not massively convinced that this proliferation of extra switches is a very good thing. With each DISTRO now having its own layer, it's quite straightforward for it to provide its own customised rootfs recipes which contain exactly the set of packages that it wants. Trying to create a sort of "generic" rootfs recipe in which every other dependency can be tweaked by some obscure variable doesn't seem like an especially productive way to proceed. Also, any new variable which is added to default-distrovars.inc will be included in the parsed metadata for everything and, although the marginal cost (in memory/performance terms) of adding one extra global variable is not that great, it's not zero either. Perhaps more significantly, there is also a cost in terms of metadata comprehensibility: one of the common complaints about "classic oe" was that it was difficult to get your head around the myriad little variables that you could tweak in some or other configuration file. So, all in all, I think we should try to keep a lid on the amount of stuff that goes into default-distrovars and its friends. If the idea of a sort of templated rootfs image really seems like a valuable one then maybe we could put those vars in a dedicated config file which is only included by the rootfs recipes. p. _______________________________________________ Openembedded-core mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-core
