[Buildroot] Some legal-info observations/problems

[Thomas De Schampheleire]

Hi Ryan,

On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 8:49 PM, Ryan Barnett
<rjbarnet at rockwellcollins.com> wrote:
> Thomas De Schampheleire <patrickdepinguin at gmail.com> wrote on
> 10/02/2013 09:06:13 AM:
>
> [...]
>
>
>> 5. the manifest also lists all host packages, like automake, autoconf,
>> ... while these are not distributed on target. Strictly speaking you
>> do not have to list these in the customer documentation of a product,
>> in my interpretation. I find it confusing that both target and host
>> packages are mixed like that.
>> Of course, it's probably difficult to change this, because some
>> packages can be built for host _and_ target, and the legal-info
>> infrastructure does not know which of these was used for a particular
>> project.
>
> One other thing that I would like to add about the legal-info that I
> would like to see added is the manifest.csv file contain the
> URL from which the source packages originated from. Is this something
> that people be interested in seeing added? As part of our release
> process, we need to show where the original source file came from (URL).
>

While I don't need the URL for my process, I currently also don't need
the name of the tarball in manifest.csv (and I leave out this last
column anyway). So, I'm not opposed to adding this extra column, but
there may be some caveats: with the OVERRIDE_SRCDIR mechanism it is
possible for a project to completely change the sources of an existing
package in buildroot. Strictly speaking this could mean that there is
no relation whatsoever between the URL specified in the .mk file and
the actual sources used. This is probably very exotic, though, and
maybe it doesn't really matter for your process.

Best regards,
Thomas