Re: Incremental target images

[Claudius Heine <claudius.heine.ext@siemens.com>]

Hi Jan,

On 2018-08-27 08:41, [ext] Jan Kiszka wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I was wondering if / how we could model the increasingly common case of 
> building very similar target images more efficiently.
> 
> A devel image, e.g., likely consists of almost the same base package set 
> as the release image. It may only add further packages and maybe replace 
> very few (like customization packages). When building both, we could 
> save time - specifically when doing cross - by bootstrapping the 
> baseline only once. We already do that for the debootstrap step, but not 
> yet for further packages.
> 
> What do you think? And how could that be modeled from user perspective?

That is not very easy.

A complex way this could be done by having a `common image` recipe that 
depends on other image recipes to deploy their required package list, 
then figure out the common dependencies of all of them and build the 
custom image. Then those other image recipes depend of the `common 
image` recipe in turn to create it, copy it and base their own 
customizations on top.

 From a user perspective they would have to add their image recipes into 
a global variable or bbappend, so that is available in the `common 
image` recipe. The rest could be done in the image classes.

Cheers,
Claudius

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