On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 10:26 PM, James Westby james.westby@linaro.orgwrote:
Hi all,
Scott asked me to take a look at the hwpack spec:
https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/UserPlatforms/Specs/10.11/HardwarePacks
I took the liberty of editing it somewhat to make the definition of a hardware pack clearer, and remove some contradiction in the implementation suggestions.
I have some questions about the goals of the spec though:
- Do we support installing more than one hardware pack on an image?
in theory yes, but practically I don't expect this to become a major use case. If it's easier assuming that there is just one in the first phase, lets do that.
- What is the purpose of the hwpack.deb that is mentioned in places?
this is scotts baby i think. personally i am fine without a hwpack.deb. I think the idea was that configs etc. like apt source lines accompanying the hwpack could be shipped in there. Personally I think its good enough to start with this meta info being optionally in the tarballs somewhere.
- Do we want to be able to pull in new versions of a hwpack on
request, or should it just be a case of updating the image, with a hwpack-install call if you want to install a newer version that pulls in new packages?
we dont want to have magic that pulls a new hwpack at this stage. hwpack-install is used to install and upgrade from a local/remote-url that points to the hwpack tarball.
However, as (iirc) mentioned in the spec, a hardware pack optionally can also ship custom apt lines, so magic upgrades without a new hwpack tarball can happen for hwpacks that come with such a location (e.g. a ppa or a partner hosted apt repository etc.).
- Do we want to support cross-installation in any way?
yes, however, we will run the hwpack-install inside a armel chroot, so thats not a technical problem for the hwpack-install binary. The magic for that will probably happen in linaro-media-create.
- What are the use cases for tags? I can only see X/no X in the spec.
tags are low priority. It came up with an ability to not install parts of the pack (like no x drivers if you dont care about X in a headless install for instance.
Other tags I envision could tag packages according to what use case they support (e.g. multimedia) or whether its a free/proprietary etc.
- What are the use cases for support information?
We want to label hwpacks as "unsupported" or "community" so we can offer them to download on snapshots.linaro.org while sending a clear message that those are not official linaro hardware packs because they don't come from a linaro consolidated kernel tree for instance.