[OE-core] RFC BuildAppliance future

[Brian Avery]

  Please note, this is going out to 3 lists in an attempt to insure that no
one who would be impacted by this change misses it. Implied spam apology
included.

  The Yocto Project currently provides a virtual machine image called the
Build Appliance (
https://downloads.yoctoproject.org/releases/yocto/yocto-2.2/build-appliance/).
This image can be run using either VirtualBox or VMware. It enables you to
build and boot a custom embedded Linux image with the Yocto Project on a
non-Linux development system.  It is not intended for day to day
development use, but instead, is intended to allow users to “try out” the
tools even if they do not have access to a Linux system.

  We are considering replacing the VM based Build Appliance with a set of
containers (https://hub.docker.com/r/crops/poky/, or if you want a user
interface (https://hub.docker.com/r/crops/toaster-master/ ).  These
containers currently provide most of the functionality of the Build
Appliance and should shortly be at feature parity with the Build
Appliance.  We are actively adding to and supporting the containers as some
of our developers are using them in their day to day development in order
to benefit from the host isolation and ease with which other distributions
can be tested.

  This is an RFC to see what features in the Build Appliance are important
to you but would not be provided by the container solutions.  If the
community would be just as content using the container approach as using
the VM based Build Appliance image, then we’d be better off deprecating the
Build Appliance and applying those resources elsewhere.  If there are
important features the Build Appliance provides which the container
solution does not, or cannot provide, we’d love to hear what they are!

Thanks in advance for any feedback,

-Brian

an Intel Employee
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