BitBake/GUI/WorkInProgress

Intro

Note: mostly raw unfiltered thoughts, please contact me before acting upon them.

M1 (Dev Complete May 23)

Bugs

• Progress bar sits at 0% when using GUI's with none server http://bugzilla.pokylinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=868
  • May be irrelevant if switching to process.py server in upstream BitBake
  • How does the image creator perform with multiprocessing. Is the ability to request a server from the UI still useful?
  • If switching to upstream BitBake we'll need to ensure xmlrpc is pulled back in
• Fix reset/build again
  • This is caused by the cooker/server exiting on build completion. Need to enable the UI to request the server doesn't terminate until it receives a signal of some sort.
• Do sane fallback on images and include extra packages in IMAGE_INSTALL

Investigation

• Investigate oetypes for listing configuration variables and suggesting appropriate values
  • lib/oe/types.py and typecheck.bbclass
  • Talk to Jeff P re: his requirements
  • Likely should be a separate configuration GUI per discussion with Darren

Features

• #770 "Add mechanism to enable UI's to request extra data be stored in the cache" http://bugzilla.pokylinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=770 (Liping/Lianhao)
• Add mechanism to enable selection of server back-end at runtime, rather than it being hard-coded. Furthermore a UI should be able to specify which server it wants to run against (Liping/Lianhao)
• Distro selector dropdown
  • as per MACHINE dropdown, partially implemented
• Build development toolchain checkbox
  • add meta-toolchain to task list
• Toolchain host combo
  • like MACHINE, set SDKMACHINE from possible files in machine-sdk, partially implemented?
• Include development headers with toolchain (easy/medium)
  • add dev-pkgs to IMAGE_FEATURES?
• Spinner to set BB_NUMBER_THREADS
• Spinner to set PARALLEL_MAKE
• Save/load previous configuration
  • save will create a .bb file from which the created image can be reproduced
  • load will parse a bb file and set up the gui
• Config write back
  • When the user changes values that could be set in local.conf offer to write those values to save the user from having to change those again in future
• A search box which does basic find in the currently selected treeview's model

M2 (Dev Complete Jul 4)

• Optimise, we could probably be faster than ~30s on Single core (dual thread) Core 2 Duo @ 1.8GHz
  • PyGtk bindings support a more simple value setting syntax, the following snippet will set the third row's values:

    model[(2,)] = ('new string value', 'string 2')

    Therefore we can optimise insertion of the data into the tree model by ensuring the data comes back as a list (one entry per row) of tuples containing appropriate values for each column.
• Package format dropdown
  • cooker able to determine classes which are appropriate for the value
  • wrap with command
  • hook up to hob
• Image output type dropdown
  • cooker able to determine all possible values for a variable
  • wrap with command
  • hook up to hob
• Sorting in Packages (by Group) column changes when item selected (included value alters sort order)
• Enable changing sort order in tree views (A-Z | Z-A | ??) by clicking column header
• Show some notification when doing long-running operations i.e. toggle a package with many DEPENDS and the UI blocks without feedback
• Bitbake reports "ERROR: Nothing to do. Use 'bitbake world' to build everything, or run 'bitbake --help' for usage information." when exiting hob, need to allow UI's to configure whether this message is relevant or not
• When cancelling a build, confirm before killing
• Show contents of images & tasks (per community feedback) http://bugzilla.pokylinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=991
• Show more information for selected package (per community feedback) http://bugzilla.pokylinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=992

M3/Future (Unplanned Extra features - Dev Complete Jul 25)

• Display and change IMAGE_FEATURES
• Enable/Disable layers
• add context menus to build view
  • view logs
  • show log directory
  • view log for task
  • copy log
  • paste bin log
• add context menus to package view
  • "Rebuild-from" with a submenu for each task of the build; fetch, unpack, compile, etc.
• hobhandler as a proxy to the server has a code smell
• Investigate/verify using the image creator with sstate mirrors (should just work!)
• "Overlay" files, extra files to be installed into the rootfs at image generation time
  • Custom ROOTFS_POSTPROCESS_COMMAND
• Allow definition of custom ROOTFS_POSTPROCESS_COMMAND's