Yesterday Richard Purdie released maintenance version of Poky ‘pinky’ branch. It contains mostly fixes to get it into buildable state in all distributions released since 3.1.1 was done.
It got over 50 changes during 1.5 year of development. Most of them were done by me as part of my work for Bug Labs company and their BUG Linux distribution. As policy of handling fixes requires to make them also in development branch it was more then just make a fix for ‘pinky’ — I also had to take care of ‘elroy’ (which had to be next stable version) and ‘master’. Some time ago support for ‘elroy’ was dropped anyway.
If you look at ‘git log’ output you will notice few authors other then just me. Thats because if fix was present in other sources such like Poky ‘master’ or OpenEmbedded I cherrypicked it and adapted to make it apply with keeping original author credits.
Did I add something new into it? Yes, few things were added:
- SPLASH support in task-poky so you can use own bootsplash tool instead of psplash
- warning for ‘/proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr’ not being set to 0 (which would break qemu)
- Python 2.6 compatibility
- BP/BPN variables which were used in Jalimo repository which we use as one of overlays
- automatic resizing of ext2/3 images if rootfs do not fit in default size
What will future bring? I hope that new stable branch for Poky will be created in next few months so developers will be able to switch. I know that some companies did a move from ‘pinky’ to ‘master’ (or snapshot of it + own changes). We at Bug Labs are moving into OpenEmbedded ‘stable/2009’ as we need newer software and want some functionality which is not present in ‘pinky’.