Re: [meta-arm] Removal of external-arm-toolchain?

Hi Ross,

On Fri, 24 Jan 2025 at 01:48, Ross Burton <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On 23 Jan 2025, at 20:00, Denys Dmytriyenko <[email protected]> wrote:
> > That said, it appears there are some other users of external toolchain - there
> > was a person from Smile recently fixing some issues with usrmerge support. And
> > I just received a personal email from one of our customers inquiring about it
> > as well. In other words - there are other interested parties out there...
>
> At the time I asked Smile what their usecase was but I’ve forgotten already.  I’ll reach out again.
>
> >> Also this is a prime use case for sstate, in particular the
> >> public yocto state server which can be used to fetch all the native tools,
> >> not just the compiler.
> >
> > This is probably a topic for another thread, but there are some issues with
> > using sstate like that - public yocto sstate server is very slow and just
> > checking what is available takes a very long time, plus cross toolchain is not
> > a native package and from my experience re-use is quite low in other distros.
>
> Try again if you haven’t recently: it has sped up a lot and I have a weekly cron job to verify that I can build packages using public sstate for the toolchain.
>
> >> So, would anyone seriously object if I sent a patch to remove the
> >> external-arm-toolchain recipe? This would only be for master, we wouldn’t
> >> retroactively remove it from the stable branches.
> >
> > As one of the meta-arm-toolchain co-maintainers[1], I would not object to
> > removing external-arm-toolchain support (the Linux side) from the layer.
>
> Thank you for being explicit.  Copying in Sumit to get his feedback.

I don't have any objections here. Without any real world use-case
scenarios now for using pre-built toolchain, it's hard to justify the
maintenance burden it comes with.

-Sumit