Re: [bitbake-devel] [RFC PATCH 0/6] fetch2: add support for implicit urls

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Tue, 2025-09-02 at 08:55 +0200, Stefan Herbrechtsmeier via lists.openembedded.org wrote:
> The patch series add support for implicit URLs inside the fetcher. The
> implicit URLs could be defined inside a source like a version control
> system (git submodule) or a lock file (package-lock.json, cargo.lock or
> go.sum). The integration of implicit URLs beside explicit URLs
> simplifies the fetcher classes and avoid bugs because of iterations
> between the Fetch and FetchMethod classes.
> 
> The series remove most methods inside the gitsm fetcher and only leaves
> the parsing of the git submodules and the unpack functionality. It
> allows the gitsm fetcher to use the premirror only feature. The current
> implementation leads to problems because the download of the git
> submodules is triggered via the download method which is called deeply
> inside the fetcher code.

We had the discussion a while back and the conclusion seemed to be that
implict urls were disliked by a significant number of people as the
were too unclear about what was going on behind the scenes and also
made things like software manifests harder. There was a strong
preference for metadata helpers and explicit lists of components which
we have for crates/rust and now for go too.

It feels like this series is moving us back to the other direction. Is
that correct and if so, what has changed in the approach since the last
discussion?

Cheers,

Richard