Suppress Texinfo utilities invoked at build time for -cross & -native recipes

Hello list,

As per discussion with Richard Purdie and others, I'm submitting a patch to suppress some unnecessary invocations of utilities from the Texinfo suite during Yocto builds. Specifically, it targets -native and -cross recipes that inherit texinfo.bbclass.

The Texinfo utilities are suppressed by supplying doppelgänger executables which understand the same command-line options as the genuine Texinfo utilites, and which can create blank output files where expected, but which do no actual processing, formatting, or markup. To see how this is done, look in the texinfo-dummy-native recipe (under meta/recipes-extended,) added in this patch series, as well as the modifications to texinfo.bbclass, also in this patch series.

Suppressing the Texinfo utilities for -native and -cross recipes does provide a noticable performance gain, as documented in bug 2421. [1] You could make the case that this patch series still does not completely address bug 2421, as there are other utilities not from the Texinfo suite (groff, pod2man, etc) which are not suppressed by these changes.

Target-architecture recipes continue to use the host system's Texinfo utilities as before, so that dependency is not eliminated by this patch series.

Regards,
-Max Eliaser

[1] https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2421
The following changes since commit 7b78c364b7de901f97cd8dbe56d5e02f545bf3d3:

cleanup-workdir: Fix crosssdk reference after addition of PN (2014-05-05 09:05:42 +0100)

are available in the git repository at:

git://git.yoctoproject.org/poky-contrib meliaser/texinfo-build
http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/poky-contrib/log/?h=meliaser/texinfo-build

Max Eliaser (3):
Allow texinfo, texinfo-native recipes to build w/o host system's
Texinfo utils
Add texinfo-dummy-native recipe w/ scripts to stand in for Texinfo
utils.
native/cross recipes use texinfo-dummy-native; target arch use host's
Texinfo.

 meta/classes/texinfo.bbclass                       |  15 ++-
 meta/conf/bitbake.conf                             |   1 +
 .../texinfo-dummy-native/texinfo-dummy-native.bb   |  30 +++++
 .../texinfo-dummy-native/texinfo-dummy/COPYING     |  19 ++++
 .../texinfo-dummy-native/texinfo-dummy/template.py | 122 +++++++++++++++++++++
 .../texinfo/texinfo/disable-native-tools.patch     |  43 --------
 .../texinfo/texinfo/use_host_makedoc.patch         |  17 ---
 meta/recipes-extended/texinfo/texinfo_5.2.bb       |   8 +-
 8 files changed, 188 insertions(+), 67 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 meta/recipes-extended/texinfo-dummy-native/texinfo-dummy-native.bb
 create mode 100644 meta/recipes-extended/texinfo-dummy-native/texinfo-dummy/COPYING
 create mode 100644 meta/recipes-extended/texinfo-dummy-native/texinfo-dummy/template.py
 delete mode 100644 meta/recipes-extended/texinfo/texinfo/disable-native-tools.patch
 delete mode 100644 meta/recipes-extended/texinfo/texinfo/use_host_makedoc.patch

1.8.3.2