OE and woofQ change to usr-merge

I have not been a fan of "usr-merge"; however, many mainstream distributions have changed, or are planning to change, to it. Let's see, Fedora, Mageia, Ubuntu, Arch, openSUSE and Void have changed, and Debian intends to do so in the next release.

OpenEmbedded/Yocto has the capability, via adding "usrmerge" to the DISTRO_FEATURES variable. "usrmerge" was introduced to OE in 2017:

https://www.openembedded.org/pipermail/openembedded-core/2017-February/132530.html

It is also documented in the OE/Yocto Reference manual:

https://docs.yoctoproject.org/4.0.12/singleindex.html#term-Source-Directory

If usrmerge is in DISTRO_FEATURES, this check will ensure that no package installs files to root (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /lib64) directories.

Some of my package build recipes have hard-coded install paths, so I will need to go through them all and fix. There are variables, such as $bindir, $sbindir and $libdir, that need to be used instead.

It is a bit of a mess in woofQ trying to support traditional folder hierarchy and user-merge, so I am thinking of giving woofQ a major overhaul to support usr-merge only. It will mean that the holdouts, such as Slackware, will no longer be supported.    

Tags: easy