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Back from OEDEM'07

Mickey · October 13, 2007

::: {.img-shadow} OEDEM07 photo unavailable. :::

The second annual OpenEmbedded DEvelopers Meeting took place in Berlin from the 6th to the 10th of October 2007. Due to the slight overlap with my vacation in Portugal, I couldn’t attend the coding sprints on 6th and 7th, however I could make it to the technical discussion days on 8th and 9th. On 9th, the generous folks from Tarent sponsored our dinner for which I’d like to say a big “Thanks, folks!!!”

This time we not only had the core developer team on board, but also key people from the various communities and interest groups, i.e. Stelios from Digital Opsis, Robert from Tarent, Graeme and me from OpenMoko, Florian from Kernel Concepts, Uli from ROAD, Philip for the Gumstix unavailable community, and more.

I’m not going to repeat all of the discussions we made (that’s what we have the meeting minutes unavailable for), however this is the executive summary from my point of view:

::: {align=“left”} OpenEmbedded has four major issues that prevent even more wide spread acceptance. In a nutshell, it boils down to :::

::: {align=“left”}

  1. Too much progress: org.openembedded.dev keeps constantly changing and (temporarily) breaking.
  2. Too much flexibility: If you want to use it as the base for your product, you’re overwhelmed by the amount of options.
  3. Not enough documentation: The reference documentation is nice, but it lacks actual workflow based tutorials and a general overview.
  4. Bad reputation about being too complex: If all you want is building applications, the learning curve is a killer. :::

::: {align=“left”} We sat together to come up with a plan of action to fix most of these issues. Briefly: :::

::: {align=“left”}

  1. Last year we agreed to releasing metadata snapshots. Most of the infrastructure (autobuilder, regression tests, etc.) is in place now, so we can actually start doing these releases early next year. The snapshots will be known-good for a certain – documented – combination of image targets and target architectures / machines. Once the snapshot gets tagged, we will branch and only apply very critical bugfixes to this branch. People can then base product work on such a snapshot. We believe it’s going to be two or three releases per year.
  2. We will add more product-based templates as examples, e.g. images like wlan-router-image.bb, nas-image.bb, set-top-box-image.bb, …
  3. Once the OE foundation work has been installed, we will use these resources to hire someone for improving the documentation.
  4. At the end of the day, there are lots of people using OpenEmbedded who really shouldn’t. OpenEmbedded gets (ab)used as a development environment, which it is not – although there is the incredibly useful command bitbake -c devshell. This can be fixed by handing out prebuilt OpenEmbedded toolchains to the people. People then can use these for application work without having to deal with OpenEmbedded at all. Alternatively – once they feel more brave – they can again use OpenEmbedded, but speed it up since they won’t have to go through the complete toolchain generation. :::

Once again, the issue of creating a registered non-commercial non-profit foundation was discussed. And this time, we finally agreed on the legal form and the statutes. We will create a german e.V. (eingetragener Verein) and the statutes will be based on the statutes of the KDE e.V.. The actual founding work will take place at FOSDEM’08 in February.