[Buildroot] [PATCH 00/29 v2] package: improve for better pulseview integration (branch yem/sdcc-fx2lafw)

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Hello Yann,

On Wed,  9 Apr 2025 22:03:42 +0200
"Yann E. MORIN" <yann.morin.1998 at free.fr> wrote:

> This series aims at making the pulseview and other sigrok-related
> packages more integrated. The series is articulated around three main
> goals, the details of which are expanded later:
>  1. cleanup and extend pulseview dependencies, notably the need for
>     fonts;
>  2. extend the boost package, for a better host variant, and better
>     maintainability;
>  3. introduce sdcc and fx2lafw, to allow use of Cypress FX2-based logic
>     analyzers.

Wow, this is a large series doing a lot of stuff. I already applied a
few of the preparation patches in order to reduce a bit the size of
your series.

Now, I have several concerns about different aspects of the series.
Nothing I am entirely against, just topics on which I am not 100% sure
on how we want to deal with them.

First topic is the some-font package and this whole idea that all font
packages should at least install some font. One thing that bothers me
is that fonts can be provided in different formats, and "some-font"
doesn't say which font format will be used/available. Should we make
this "some-ttf-font", or something like that? Is that even a mechanism
we want in Buildroot at all? Arnout, Peter, Julien, Romain, any opinion?

Second topic of concern is how you handle the host-boost dependency.
You add a "select BR2_PACKAGE_HOST_BOOST" to all packages that need
host-boost, adding hidden Config.in.host options for all of them. Is
this really what we want? So far, we have never required
BR2_PACKAGE_HOST_* options to be selected (think
BR2_PACKAGE_HOST_PKGCONF for example). So to stay consistent, I would
rather suggest that the BR2_PACKAGE_HOST_BOOST_<something> hidden
options that are needed get added and selected by whoever need them,
but BR2_PACKAGE_HOST_BOOST isn't needed, nor it is necessary for
packages to select it. Of course, unless we decide to bite the bullet
and have Config.in.host options for all host packages, always selected,
but that's a huge effort and complicated one (think host-cmake, which
may or may not be built depending on whether there is a suitable CMake
version on the host machine). Here as well, Peter, Arnout, Julien,
Romain, any opinion?

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, co-owner and CEO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering and training
https://bootlin.com