Distro Tracking

Motivation

The Distro Tracking Fields (meta/conf/distro/include/distro_tracking_fields.inc) is a location for sharing information about the status of recipes and tracking version information. Not all of this information can be generated automatically (yet), so the manual editing is needed.

Package Tracking Website

The Yocto Project hosts a package tracking website, that show information about the version and maintainership. The webpage can be found at http://packages.yoctoproject.org

Changing Maintainers

From time to time recipe ownership changes, if you are interested in contributing to the Yocto Project recipes as part of OpenEmbedded-Core or other layers, then please take a look at the who the current maintainer is and let them know you would like to help. When you do that and the current owner replies, please update the distro_tracking_fields.inc with your name as RECIPE_MAINTAINER.

Development Cycle & Updating

As the Yocto Project wants to keep the to the most current stable release of the upstream projects, the maintainers will receive email during the development milestones reminding them to update their recipes as appropriate. This will also be tracked by the core maintainers, if a recipe is not updated in a timely manner, the core maintainers may update it directly. If the recipe maintainer is unable to continue updating their recipes beyond 1 release, the core maintainers may choose to re-assign the recipe, so the recipe does not become stale.

Distro Tracking Fields

The file meta/conf/distro/include/distro_tracking_fields.inc exists to allow us to track various pieces of information about recipes and upstream versions (e.g, recipe maintainer contact information, date of latest upstream release, alternate names used for this recipe in other Linux distros, etc). We keep the metadata via BitBake Overrides. The following defines the meaning of each field:

RECIPE_STATUS

Indicates whether the recipe has been reviewed for basic quality control information (e.g, has had its software license verified). "red" indicates these checks have not been done, and "green" indicates that they have been done.

RECIPE_DEPENDENCY_CHECK

Indicates whether the recipe has been built from scratch to verify that all of its build and runtime dependencies have been specified. Value is either "not done" or "done"

RECIPE_LATEST_VERSION

The latest upstream stable version, "3.0"

RECIPE_NO_OF_PATCHES

The number of patches we ship with the recipe.

RECIPE_PATCH

Summarizes the purpose of each patch associated with a recipe.

RECIPE_LATEST_RELEASE_DATE

The date at which the latest upstream stable version (mentioned in RECIPE_LATEST_VERSION) was released, "03/2010"

RECIPE_TIME_BETWEEN_LAST_TWO_RELEASES

The amount of time which passed between the most recent two upstream stable releases, "2 months"

RECIPE_COMMENTS

A field to mention comments, such as why a recipe can't be brought up to the latest upstream release, or unusual build issues that need to be worked around.

RECIPE_LAST_UPDATE

Date of the last changes to the recipe, "Dec 10, 2010"

RECIPE_MAINTAINER

Name and email address of the person maintaining the recipe, "Firstname Lastname <email.address>"

Note that in the file, each field name is appended with -pn-<recipe name> as defined in BitBake Overrides

RECIPE_DISTRO_PN_ALIAS

More information for using the DISTRO_PN_ALIAS variable

• Configuring the DISTRO_PN_ALIAS variable

Sometimes the names of the same packages are different in different linux distributions; and that can becomes an issue for the distro_check task to check if the given recipe package exists in other linux distros. This issue is avoided by defining per distro recipe name alias: DISTRO_PN_ALIAS

• Specifying the DISTRO_PN_ALIAS variable

DISTRO_PN_ALIAS_pn-xset = "Fedora=xorg-x11-server-utils Ubuntu=x11-xserver-utils Debian=x11-xserver-utils Opensuse=xorg-x11"

Note that 'space' is used as delimiter here

• Tip

The current code can check if the src package for a recipe exists in the latest releases of these distributions automatically: Fedora, OpenSuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Mandrina

For example, this command will generate a report, listing which linux distros include the sources for each of the poky recipe.

bitbake world -f -c distro_check

This may require adding distrodata to the INHERIT list The results will be stored in the build/tmp/log/distro_check-${DATETIME}.results file.

Other Distribution Package Search Tools

Debian

http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

Fedora

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb

Ubuntu

http://packages.ubuntu.com

OpenSUSE

http://packages.opensuse-community.org/

RedHat

http://www.rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/

BitBake Overrides

We will create a set of BitBake Overides for DEPENDENCY_CHECK and RECIPE_STATUS with defaults of "not done" and as recipes are checked the appropriate file will be updated to contain the status, these files will then be used to generate the spreadsheet / progress report so we know where we stand.

There're also additional overrides we'd like to track for project progress:

• RECIPE_LATEST_VERSION_pn+<packagename>="x.y.z"; Override for missing or inaccurate version information from kevin’s script
• RECIPE_PATCH_pn+<packagename>+<patchname>="description/status"; Description about a patch's purpose and its status whether necessary to keep
• RECIPE_COMMENTS_pn+<packagename>="comments"; Contain micellaneous useful information about the package
• RECIPE_TIME_BETWEEN_LAST_TWO_RELEASES_pn+<packagename>="5 months"; Activity tracking information
• RECIPE_LATEST_RELEASE_DATE_pn+<packagename>="2010/03/03"; Last release date
• RECIPE_INTEL_SECTION_pn="base"; section info defined by distro team, which may replace current SECTION later