[LEDE-DEV] Removing package overlay functionality

[Yousong Zhou]

On 17 April 2017 at 10:38, Philip Prindeville
<philipp at redfish-solutions.com> wrote:
> commit b044bd5921e9644c9df9655bef10cee0af730724
> Author: Felix Fietkau <nbd at nbd.name>
> Date:   Mon Apr 3 12:36:35 2017 +0200
>
>     build: remove package makefile overlay functionality
>
>     Recent attempts to use it have shown that it does not work properly
>     except for a few undocumented cases. It's better to remove this now to
>     avoid having more people fall into the same trap
>
>     Signed-off-by: Felix Fietkau <nbd at nbd.name>
>
>
> I was using the overlay functionality, having been steered toward it after my suggestion of adding pre- and post-install hooks that could be added by the developer to customize the build process was nixed (for instance, if you want to run a trivial sed script on a config file which is generated from a .in file and therefore hard to patch).
>
> Yousong steered me toward using the Build/IncludeOverlay mechanism (see the thread “Makefile Question” around 13 Feb 2017).
>
> Now I abruptly found the overlay mechanism has been deleted, and I don’t recall seeing any discussion on whether to do this or not, just the following post script after the fact:
>
>> I agree. I've pushed a commit to my staging tree that removes package
>> overlay support.
>
> If it’s hard to use, it should be fixed, not removed.  If it can’t be fixed, then it should be better documents.
>
> Telling someone to use “method X” and then 2 months later deleting it after they’ve spent the time trying to figure out how to use it isn’t cool.
>
> My impression was that LEDE was going to be a little more welcoming to a broader developer community.
>
> Yanking the carpet out from under people doesn’t strike me as particularly welcoming, nor much of a reward for someone bothering to learn about some of the arcane aspects of the system (why bother, if your knowledge could be rendered obsolete in the time it takes someone else to snap their fingers?).
>
> I think we can and should do better than this.
>
> -Philip
>

Hi, Philip

Sorry for the earlier kind of misguiding advices and your loss of time
;)  Like said earlier about host uci support, it will be hard decision
to drop a feature and it's certainly not cool.  But I also think this
change itself is a right one.

Apart from the already known shortcomings, this buildoverlay feature
seems to me encourage writing temporary hacking code that's bound to
fail at later point of time.  The other minor thing is that overlay
makefile and package to be overlaid are connected together only by a
directory name which is very fragile now that we can have that name
shared among packages from different feeds.

There are other cleaner ways to do what buildovery could do.  Editing
directly Makefile of package to be overlaid is the quick and obvious
way.  Maintaining your own feeds of packages is another.

Regards,
                yousong