Andrea, Thanks for the detailed feedback on the YP documentation. Agree that it is difficult to meet the needs of the wide group of users and that it is difficult to have the released documentation match that of the "latest" from the website. The "latest" documentation is always under development and I fear will never match the released documentation. One radical scheme to consider is releasing a separate tarball for documentation that a user could download and then insert into their poky repository on the local system. This would in a sense de-couple the docs and the released poky tarball. Probably not a popular idea among the team but an out-of-the-box one nonetheless.
We will continue to try and improve specific workflows based on specific target audience needs. Feedback such as this helps. Scott -----Original Message----- From: yocto-boun...@yoctoproject.org [mailto:yocto-boun...@yoctoproject.org] On Behalf Of Andrea Galbusera Sent: Friday, October 05, 2012 8:43 AM To: yocto@yoctoproject.org Subject: [yocto] Yocto Project 1.3 beta feedback Below you can find my answers to the Yocto Project 1.3 beta testing survey. Regards, Andrea Experience survey of using Yocto 1.3 Q: Which architecture did you choose to build? A: qemuppc, beagleboard Q: How easily were you able to build an image and boot an image? A: Quite easily. I also took some time for reviewing the QS guide which looks adequate to me either for newbies or users coming from different build systems. Q: Is there any surprise to you in the process of doing this Beta testing? If so, would you please describe it and tell us how you expected it to work? A: Not really a surprise (already knew about that), but a very pleasant experience was knotty2. It results cleaner than its "forever-scrolling" parent. Q: How do you like our HOB interface? Please provide us with your thoughts and suggestions on HOB interface and functionality. A: I like the hob design. It actually does not support yet a few workflows that I consider much important for my work: i.e. adding new recipes, supporting kernel development (mainly configuration, patching). I understand not every user does require them and hence I don't consider myself as the actual hob's average target user. Anyway I appreciate the project is working on more intuitive tools like HOB and I look forward to see if similar effort will also bring us webhob experience in the future. People doing mainly package integration would benefit the best from HOB, since they need not to dig into the build system's details. Q: Was it easy to find the support you needed to build and boot an image? A: Procedures for the official emulated target are well documented and clear enough for the task required by this beta testing. Support for deploying and booting on reference real-hardware target is a little bit lacking but a lot of resources and documentation are already available online and I agree on not duplicating reference material. Q: Which Bugzilla reports did you submit? A: None till now. Still investigating on some oddities and discussing with the team on IRC. Also hit bug #3135, which is already fixed in master now. Q: Did you try anything else with Yocto 1.3? A: Building an SDK and investigating procedures to deploy toolchains, SDKs and ADTs is one of my primary goals. I built toolchains for the arm architecture and tested the environment to build a simple C source. Relocatable SDK is a good improvement in term of flexibility when deploying for application developers. The beta snapshot does bring bug #3135, but it's already fixed in master. Q: What would you like to have in Yocto Project for future releases? A: Documentation as a whole IMHO should and must improve a bit to make it more useful for reference. At the design level, I see the team is working very well, by keeping the documentation in a single place: this grants us consistency and its really a good point. I still see some confusion between online documentation, documentation source you can build from master and the "latest" online documentation which is often referenced on the mailing list. However I know that keeping all the docs up-to-date and consistent is not an easy job. Needs with respect to documentation do largely depend on the user's perspective. For instance, if your goal is writing new recipes for your own layers, you'll ask for a good variables reference and, maybe, a reasonable checklist with best conventions for keeping metadata consistent. This is also required if you want to contribute back with high degree of confidence that your patches will be considered and reviewed. If, on the other hand, your are more involved in kernel configuration and customization, your hope is to keep your work as much as possible integrated with the build system: this will grant you a closer develop-deploy-test flow by using the same tools will be used for production. Such a workflow does have documentation but I personally believe this is a point we can improve a lot. Yocto Project users do belong to a very heterogeneous base: I see a great challenge in keeping docs usable by differently focused people! _______________________________________________ yocto mailing list yocto@yoctoproject.org https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/yocto _______________________________________________ yocto mailing list yocto@yoctoproject.org https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/yocto