BitBake/GUI/WorkInProgress

Intro

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

M1 (Dev Complete May 23)

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) - WIP Liping working on a patch set
• 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 - WIP partial implementation of Configurator gobject
  • 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 (gtk.TreeView.set_search_entry)
  • Could do with a custom gtk.TreeView.set_search_equal_func()

M2 (Dev Complete Jul 4)

Features

• 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
• Image output type dropdown
  • all possible values for IMAGE_FSTYPES set in class
  • getVariable used to get list, split on " " and put into combobox
• Fix sorting in Packages treeview. Sorting by group would be enabled here.
  • 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
• Enable/Disable layers - use configuration writeback support for local.conf changes to also edit/save bblayers.conf changes
  • Properly reload the data when the layers are modified

Bugs

• Fix reset/build again
  • I think this is caused by the cooker/server exiting on build completion. If so we need to enable the UI to request the server doesn't terminate until it receives a signal of some sort.
• We need to be able to switch from a stopped/completed build back to the image creation mode.
• Fix removing *all* packages in sweep

Future (Unplanned extra features - schedule at next map day)

• Tell the user where the created image is on disk (as a medium term enhancement also allow opening the containing folder, long term allow writing the image to some media)
• 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
• 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!)
  • Add GUI to set sstate mirror variable
• "Overlay" files, extra files to be installed into the rootfs at image generation time
  • Custom ROOTFS_POSTPROCESS_COMMAND
• Display and change IMAGE_FEATURES
• Consider a name change, David suggested 'Yocto HOB (Human Oriented Builder)'
• Consider allowing dragging a package from the list to the contents area
• Warn when removing the core layers
• Have build dir be a part of the workspace so that everything done with the GUI tool is part of the same directory.