The less custom patching, the better I'd say. If we stay close to a stock OE and a stock kernel, updating to newer
versions
will make things easier. Would it be possible to automatically update our OE to be in sync with the latest official OE tree and throw our overlays tree over there? If any recent OE changes break something in our overlay, we should fix it there. That would make things easier in the future, don't you think?
We only tend to float around 50-60 patches over mainline OE at any given time, a lot of them are hacks that need refactoring to go into mainline or stuff that is already in OE's Patchwork and we are waiting to flow down, that really tends to keep us closely tied during the image process as we never drift that far for the parent tree.
The bigger drift comes from when we freeze a release to put a stake in the ground for stability (as we did with the Z release). We should try and look at how we can improve that in time, tracking OE/Angstrom stable branches may be an option. This is a minefield and we are a little at the mercy of how the Yocto/Poky/OE thing pans out so I would not like to change the status quo just yet.
Just as an aside the old AI TouchBook trees used to run at several hundred plus checkins over mainline making it very hard to merge and maintain their own patch set over OE, you think we have problems ;).
If I could test the kernel on our current image as well, it should be
easier to
tell.
Not going to happen, sorry, way too much of a giant pain in the arse ;-). In some ways it is a non-issue as a bug is a bug, just report it on the new images and tell people how to produce it, we can soon track down the root cause. It's not been a problem before.
John