[OE-core] [RFC] Add something like bitbake -cmenuconfig <recipe> ?

[Otavio Salvador]

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 5:45 AM, Paul Eggleton
<paul.eggleton at linux.intel.com> wrote:
> Hi Robert,
>
> On Monday 18 May 2015 09:52:50 Robert Yang wrote:
>> On 05/17/2015 05:34 AM, Richard Purdie wrote:
>> > On Fri, 2015-05-15 at 10:35 +0800, Robert Yang wrote:
>> >> Is is useful/possible if we add something like bitbake <recipe>
>> >> -cmenuconfig, just like kernel's make menuconfig ?
>> >>
>> >> We can use the menuconfig to config the vars such as MACHINE, DL_DIR,
>> >> DISTRO_FEATURES, MACHINE_FEATURES and all the variables which are
>> >> configurable, I think that this would help the newbie a lot.
>> >>
>> >> I think that we can add a menuconfig.bbclass (or other names) to do this,
>> >> and I'd like to work on it.
>> >
>> > Why would you want to specify a <recipe> when configuring MACHINE? I
>> > understand why you're thinking this but it isn't well thought out and in
>> > this form would confuse users more than help them.
>> >
>> > I don't think the system will even parse without a valid MACHINE, let
>> > alone execute tasks.
>>
>> I meant that we need something to help configure the build easier, it
>> can generate something like local.conf.append, not configure the recipe.
>>
>> The example "bitbake <recipe> -cmenuconfig" wasn't right enough, it's
>> just a rough thought, we can use the current default local.conf
>> (MACHINE = qemux86) to make system parse.
>>
>> The problem is that we have many bbclasses in oe-core, a lot of them
>> has specify configurations, and also a lot of vars in the conf file such
>> as bitbake.conf, it's not easy to know how and what to config, especially,
>> for newbies. The "bitbake -cmenuconfig" maybe not a good idea, I think that
>> we need something to help config the build (generate local.conf) easier,
>> do you have any suggestions, please ?
>
> This is likely the direction we will be going in with the Toaster web UI -
> with a web-based tool we can present a much friendlier interface and have the
> chance to link to other information, for example we can link to the
> appropriate manual section for individual variables (and in future error
> messages, classes, etc.), analyse the output of the build, manage multiple
> sets of configuration, etc. These are things that would be difficult to do
> practically from the command line.

Toaster is nice but we shouldn't stop improving cmdline use as the
first won't work for some use-cases.

-- 
Otavio Salvador                             O.S. Systems
http://www.ossystems.com.br        http://code.ossystems.com.br
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