KDE Yocto Updates

Tuesday, 1 November 2022  |  Andreas Cord-Landwehr

Time is running and already a couple of weeks passed since I have been at this year’s Akademy in Barcelona. It was great to (finally again!!!) meet people in person and talk about free software projects, while eating tapas our having nice beer.

One of the topics on my agenda was the next iteration of our Yocto layers. At the moment we have two layers provided by KDE for downstream usage, “meta-kf5” and “meta-kde“. The first provides a simple integration of KDE Frameworks into Yocto projects and the second one is a set of KDE Plasma (Desktop, Mobile & Bigscreen) and KDE Gears applications, which is mostly focused on providing nice show cases of KDE software.

Using the opportunity to have most people in Barcelona for a live meeting and the missing ones at least via remote, we had a quite intense BoF session. For the details just have a look at the notes. For me, the main points and results are these:

  • We finally have a wiki landing page for Yocto in KDE: https://community.kde.org/Yocto. This page is supposed to document the main workflows for our Yocto layers, give a first starting point for on-boarding and also explain to downstream users what we want to achieve. Most points are not there yet in all the details they are supposed to, but work is ongoing.
  • Our next important goal is to finally get the Yocto layers running in the KDE CI. As an important preparation step, we now introduce Repo manifests that help us to organize the different meta-layers and their revisions we depend on. This is actually what most projects in the Yocto ecosystem are doing, so it’s also part of our housekeeping. As already some time passed since Akademy, the first manifest files are in place and are ready to use, just follow the README. As an important side-note, they not only help with CI but very much speed up bootstrapping your system in case you want to test our layers.
  • And finally, I took over the Yocto layer maintainer role from Volker. To celebrating this, I directly ordered yet another 2 TB SSD, which now is already 41% full with Yocto artifacts 😀

If you want to have a look at the KDE Yocto layers, best first have a short glance at the wiki page and then just try it out by using the default.xml manifest.