[Buildroot] [PATCH 0/8] imx: update multimedia packages to 4.9.88_2.0.0_ga

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Hello,

On Thu, 26 Jul 2018 11:26:51 +0200, Arnout Vandecappelle wrote:

>  I'm sorry for all the work that you did, but I don't really agree that this is
> a good idea. The upstream package really is called imx-vpu, so we prefer to keep
> that name. We changed the name for openssl because there really was no other
> way, but I do prefer to avoid that.
> 
>  So I think it's just a matter of finding a better name for the virtual package.
> What about imx-vpu-provider?

I have not reviewed the patch series carefully enough yet, but a
question is: do we need a virtual package at all?

I guess the imx-vpu API is not going to be used by gazillions of
packages. If I read PATCH 5/8 correctly, it's in fact only used by two
packages, right ?

Can't we simply have those two packages do:

ifeq ($(BR2_PACKAGE_FREESCALE_IMX_PLATFORM_IMX8M),y)
use the new imx-vpu package
else
use the old imx-vpu package
endif

And ditto in their Config.in ?

Virtual packages are great when there is really an arbitrary number of
providers and/or an arbitrary number of users.

OpenSSL for examples has only two providers, but it has a very large
number of users. Ditto jpeg. MySQL does not have a lot of users, but it
might potentially have.

Also, the i.MX VPU stuff is highly platform-specific, it provides a
very specialized API, it's very unlikely that we will see gazillions of
packages depending on the i.MX VPU API.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons)
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com