[Buildroot] [PATCH 1/2] git: fix handling of git repos using master as version

[Gary Bisson <gary.bisson@boundarydevices.com>]

Hi Bob

On Mon, Jun 04, 2018 at 05:32:41PM +0100, Bob Beckett wrote:
> Thanks for the more in depth explanation.
> 
> I agree with all of the reasons outlined for the purpose of being purely a
> reproducible build manager, which buildroot only ever aimed to be.
> 
> However, people do use it during development, and with a reasonably large
> number of custom packages all in development at the same time, using the
> _OVERRIDE_SRCDIR method to test latest versions of multiple packages
> becomes very unwieldy.
> My solution so far has been to point the version at the branch that active
> development is taking place on, and removing the build directories and
> packages for the specific projects each time.
> When I am not the one doing the development on each package's source, but
> am developing the rootfs, this means I dont have to manually keep updating
> my local git repositories for each project.
> Once each package has hit their first release version, they do get tagged
> and the release branch for the project's BR2_EXTERNAL directory gets
> updated with those versions, and each version thereafter, but the
> development branch for the external directory persistently stays on the
> development branch head for each package.
> 
> Regarding not knowing the sha before a checkout, would git ls-remote not
> suffice for this? e.g.
> 
> $ git ls-remote git at gitlab.com:adhlinux/buildroot/buildroot.git master
> 407fb2fe202aaeb273e4986dc88c30596a7fe8db    refs/heads/master
> 407fb2fe202aaeb273e4986dc88c30596a7fe8db    refs/remotes/upstream/master

Yes 'ls-remote' is actually a good option. You could have the following
package version during development:
FOO_VERSION = $(shell git ls-remote URL branch | awk '{ print $$1 }')

Then it would pick up any change automatically until you finish your dev
and change the FOO_VERSION to a proper ID.

> It would allow you to check for changes in sha without doing a new fetch.
> 
> Oh well, not to worry. Ill keep it as a local patch, as I suspect I am
> treading old ground of "buildroot is not a development platform" (Ive seen
> this discussion come up multiple times before).

Yes that will most likely not be included inside BR infrastructure but that
should be a perfectly fine option for your custom package.

Regards,
Gary