Rebasing yocto to new freedesktop platform?

[Robert McQueen]

On 06/03/17 08:28, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> The current freedesktop platform is based on yocto 2.0, which is now
> "Community supported"[1], and i've heard some complaints about the age
> of some components. Maybe its time to do a freedesktop 1.6 based on the
> latest stable yocto (2.2).

I think if we're claiming to maintain the runtimes centrally for reasons 
including timeliness of incorporating security updates, we should meet 
that expectation and do so eagerly... :)

> I'm going to do some experimenting with building it today. If it works
> out we should probably switch to it in the gnome nightly builds and
> target it for the gnome 3.24 release.

If you are in an experimenting mood, I wonder if there are any yocto 
reproducible build overlays/whatever that could usefully be turned on? 
Even if not perfect / full coverage, anything that increases our chance 
of not spitting out new binaries when nothing else has changed, reduces 
download churn for end users.

Generally speaking, I'm a little nervous in general about the size of 
the enforced re-download when we rebuild these base runtimes. Hopefully 
something like BuildStream can help us reach a "fully reproducible" 
flying car future, but in the meantime I'd be interested in seeing what 
Yocto has to offer.

The effect is compounded with "derived" runtimes like GNOME, etc - if 
the user doesn't update them at the same time, you would also duplicate 
many likely source-identical but different-binary objects from the old 
and new fd.o runtimes on the system, both on disk and in memory when 
apps are running.

Cheers,
Rob

........................................................................

Robert McQueen  |  +1.415.413.4159  |  Endless <http://endlessm.com/>