Bug 9505

Summary: SDKs no longer provide opkg packaging data
Product: [Build System, Metadata & Runtime] OE-Core Reporter: Denys Dmytriyenko <denis>
Component: deploymentAssignee: Paul Eggleton <bluelightning>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: Yi Zhao <yi.zhao>
Severity: major    
Priority: Medium+ CC: jose.perez.carranza
Version: 2.1   
Target Milestone: 2.2 M1   
Hardware: x86   
OS: Multiple   
Whiteboard:
OS type for building Yocto: --- Type of Regression: ---
Verified: Documentation change: Yes (doc changes required)
Attachments:
Description Flags
preserve packaging data when SDKIMAGE_FEATURES has "package-management" none

Description Denys Dmytriyenko 2016-04-21 19:01:28 UTC 
Created attachment 3146 [details]
preserve packaging data when SDKIMAGE_FEATURES has "package-management"

All past releases used to provide opkg packaging database in generated SDKs. We have tooling around that data to parse and extract useful information. But recently SDKs no longer have that data. It appears it was simply removed due to some limitations in the way opkg creates some portion of that database by symlinking files in /var/lib/opkg/lists/ directory:

http://cgit.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/commit/?id=c8e0ec2da9ad4ce1c103966906a85f68c15400dd

While the /var/lib/opkg/lists/ directory containing broken symlinks is a concern (and there are workarounds available), the rest of the packaging database is still valid and of great use.

Attached is the patch to make this configurable and allow setting a variable to preserve packaging database in SDKs.
Comment 1 Paul Eggleton 2016-04-27 03:52:56 UTC 
From the discussion on IRC I think we'll try to get this in early for 2.2 and try to backport it to krogoth after the 2.1 release, since it's a bit late in the release cycle to be making such a change.
Comment 2 Paul Eggleton 2016-05-09 03:21:09 UTC 
This was merged to master:

http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=5bfd397e16ddae0ad7a1abce36bb8a112e743df0

Also backported to the krogoth branch for a future 2.1.1 point release:

http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?h=krogoth&id=5bfd397e16ddae0ad7a1abce36bb8a112e743df0

We'll need to update the manual to cover the extra functionality accessible through SDKIMAGE_FEATURES.