On 15/08/12 10:46, Paul Eggleton wrote:

Hi all,

There have been a few requests to review the task recipes (i.e. package
groups) provided by OE-Core, and indeed these have not really been looked at
seriously since OE-Core was created. Ideally I think we want them to be useful
to a wide audience and provide useful units of functionality that can be added
to an image without the person doing the selection having to manually select
too many individual packages. Imagine presenting the list of tasks to someone
in a UI for assembling images (such as Hob or Narcissus) and you can start to
see that we have some work to do in this area.

I know various distros and users of OE-Core have created their own tasks or
resurrected tasks from OE-Classic, and this is an opportunity to perhaps look
at bringing some of these (or at least, parts of them) into the core. It is
true that tasks will often be an expression of distro policy, and we also
can't have any tasks in OE-Core that refer to packages that don't exist in OE-
Core; thus distros will always be extending the base tasks or adding their own
- and that's fine. However, with some thought I believe we can come up with a
set of tasks that are generally useful to most people using OE-Core.

For reference, I've compiled a list on the wiki of the current tasks in OE-
Core with links to the recipes and some notes:

   http://www.openembedded.org/wiki/OE-Core_Task_Rework

Some of the things I think we ought to consider/address as part of this
exercise:

1) Do we rename "task" to something a little more understandable to the
uninitiated, such as "package group"? The word "task" is already used in a
much more natural sense within bitbake as a unit of work. Historically I
believe we picked up this term from Debian but I'm not aware of significant use
by other mainstream distributions.

Do the 'tasks' do anything other than specify meta-data groups? If they 
don't include any glue or additional processes then I strongly agree 
that the name should be changed.

-- 

   Jack Mitchell (jack@embed.me.uk)
   Embedded Systems Engineer
   http://www.embed.me.uk

--