What do you want in a package manager?

[Patrick Williams]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 12:57:00AM -0700, Nancy Yuen wrote:
> I'm looking into package management for BMCs in our fleet.  I'm wondering
> who else is interested in this, does it make sense for OpenBMC.  What kind
> of features are important?  What kind of package format (rpm, deb,
> something else)?

We've similarly started playing with package management at Facebook.
One of the reasons for us doing it is that we still have Python
installed in the image and are running out of space, so we're moving
some of the debug tools into packages that can be side-loaded as needed.
We've also implemented 'ptest', which allows you to create packages
containing your unit tests and run them on a real machine.

We found that we had to switch to ipkg instead of rpm because the extra
things rpm needed were too big to fit.  I recall it was on the order of
5MB of content needed to make rpm work and ipkg was almost free. [1]

One issue you'll want to be aware of, that many of our recipes have, is
that they often are missing:

    PACKAGE_ARCH = "${MACHINE_ARCH}"

This causes the package to be specified as relevant for a generic ARM
system, matching the architecture revision of your underlying AST2xxx
chip, rather than your particular machine.  Any package which can be
customized for a particular machine (such as by machine-specific compile
flags, or YAML/JSON files) should have the above variable set so that a
package compiled for Witherspoon cannot be installed onto a Zaius.

If you look under your Yocto build tree under `tmp/work` you'll see
`arm1176jzs-openbmc-linux-gnueabi` and
`witherspoon-openbmc-linux-gnueabi`.  I suspect at least most of the
phosphor-* packages under the arm1176jzs subdirectory are likely candidates
for having this PACKAGE_ARCH fixed.  We might want to simply add it to
any '.bbappend' we do in a machine layer.

1. https://github.com/facebook/openbmc/commit/43430d38dfd0e5557f96940547594e01373f863e

-- 
Patrick Williams
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