On Tue, 2009-03-03 at 13:30 +0100, Koen Kooi wrote: OK, I apologize in advance, but that statement has pricked the festering boil of my feelings about this matter, and I feel that I must address it. > Well, TI is using OE to build their new PSPs, your point is moot :) Not really - that assumes that OE becomes the new standard for all builds. The reason I don't use OE is that I could never get to where I could regenerate anything non-trivial (like Angstrom) due to errors in Bitbake and the various OE black magic^W^W"recipes". Attempting to work through the problems with the OE devs touched upon just about every pet peeve I have with Free Software projects: Me: "I cannot get this to build, here's what I am doing, here's the script I use to set the environment variables needed for OE, here's the errors I am getting." Them: "I don't like the fact that you are using this temporary environment variable to set these other variables." Me: "OOOKAAAY, but that variable is a temporary and has nothing to do with anything. It gets unset at the end of the script. As you can see, the variables OE needs are set correctly." Them: "I am going to fixate upon your use of this environment variable and not address the problem you are having, for I don't really understand how to fix your problem." Me: "GRRR. OK. Fine. I set all the variables BY HAND. Here is a transcript of my exact session. Here is THE SAME DAMN PROBLEM happening." Them #1: "I still don't like that you were using that temporary variable, and will ignore the fact that you aren't using it now." Them #2: "Oh, you are using the released version of Bitbake. Silly boy, that version is horribly busted. Go get the newest version from Subversion, because we feel that actually releasing fixed code is unnecessary if you have public access to your source code control system." Me: "OK, I removed the released version my distro vendor has, and installed the version from Subversion. Now it doesn't even run at all." Them: <crickets chirp.wav> I am sorry, but I have tried, step by step, to follow the instructions on the OE site to reproduce Angstrom. They don't work for me. They are incomplete and incorrect, with many of the examples being demonstrably WRONG. I have tried to follow the instructions on the Angstrom site (which, BTW, are very different than the OE instructions). They, too, are incomplete and demonstrably wrong in many cases. Sorry, but I am NOT going to base MY project on something that I cannot get working after several WEEKS of effort to get working. Yes, I know "it works for me" for certain values of "me", but I cannot get it working under bog-standard Debian, so that doesn't help me. Don't get me wrong: I *love* Free Software. I've had far worse experiences with commercial software like pSOS, VxWorks, and <shudder> Windows than this. But I do feel the "it's fixed in CVS, so it's FIXED: full stop" attitude is WRONG - if it isn't released it isn't fixed yet. I do feel that the various Rainman-like folks who will completely ignore the real problem to pick at an unrelated piece of lint (and thus lower the signal to noise ratio of the channel below usability) aren't helping. I feel the "this is broken in upstream, so we'll break out the duct tape here rather than trying to fix the upstream" mindset is antithetical to the idea of "Let's all SHARE the improvements". I am just trying to help improve things so that Free Software becomes better every day. The idea that I have to use a specific "vendor" for my project - be that vendor Microsoft or be that vendor OpenEmbedded - just because obvious issues aren't being fixed in a truly portable fashion is ABSURD. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-omap" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
