Re: [PATCH] meta/classes: generate bill of material from image

[Baurzhan Ismagulov <ibr@radix50.net>]

On Mon, Aug 05, 2019 at 04:43:27PM +0200, Henning Schild wrote:
> do you have a real use-case for that? In fact we do have similar things
> internally already but did not propose it yet. Reason is you still need
> to find all the magic switches to collect the source and binary package
> versions, and you most likely want a machine readable format.
> 
> In fact we should just fix that broken offline cache thing and enable
> src-packages for it. That would generate a list that will hopefully be
> complete and in a well defined format.
> 
> Without the real use-case and the post-processing this is just another
> obscure Isar feature and i am against merging it.

Isar has started to be useful today. As such, it has known limitations. E.g.,
bitbake isn't the perfect tool for the job, either. That said, if we waited
till we develop the perfect tool, we wouldn't have been here. If the feature
has value, I wouldn't like to discard it outright.

Regarding the base-apt design -- here we need either debootstrap introspection
(which it possibly doesn't have having been developed in shell to run on
non-Debian systems), or reimplement multistrap in perl (as discussed with other
debian-embedded developers). According to an ELBE developer, they also use this
approach, so this seems to be state of the art ATM. But I agree that solving
this upfront in a separate step would simplify the architecture.

With kind regards,
Baurzhan.