On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 10:26 PM, James Westby <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:james.westby@linaro.org">james.westby@linaro.org</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi all,<br>
<br>
Scott asked me to take a look at the hwpack spec:<br>
<br>
  <a href="https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/UserPlatforms/Specs/10.11/HardwarePacks" target="_blank">https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/UserPlatforms/Specs/10.11/HardwarePacks</a><br>
<br>
I took the liberty of editing it somewhat to make the definition of a<br>
hardware pack clearer, and remove some contradiction in the<br>
implementation suggestions.<br>
<br>
I have some questions about the goals of the spec though:<br>
<br>
  1. Do we support installing more than one hardware pack on an image?<br></blockquote><div><br>in theory yes, but practically I don&#39;t expect this to become a major use case. If it&#39;s easier assuming that there is just one in the first phase, lets do that.<br>
 </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
  2. What is the purpose of the hwpack.deb that is mentioned in places?<br></blockquote><div><br>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.<br>
 </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
  3. Do we want to be able to pull in new versions of a hwpack on<br>
  request, or should it just be a case of updating the image, with a<br>
  hwpack-install call if you want to install a newer version that pulls<br>
  in new packages?<br></blockquote><div><br>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.<br><br>
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.).<br>
<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
  4. Do we want to support cross-installation in any way?<br></blockquote><div><br>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.<br>
 </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
  5. What are the use cases for tags? I can only see X/no X in the spec.<br></blockquote><div><br>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.<br>
<br>Other tags I envision could tag packages according to what use case they support (e.g. multimedia) or whether its a free/proprietary etc.<br><br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">

  6. What are the use cases for support information?<br><br></blockquote><div><br>We want to label hwpacks as &quot;unsupported&quot; or &quot;community&quot; so we can offer them to download on <a href="http://snapshots.linaro.org">snapshots.linaro.org</a> while sending a clear message that those are not official linaro hardware packs because they don&#39;t come from a linaro consolidated kernel tree for instance.<br>
<br> </div></div>-- <br><br> - Alexander<br><br>