[Buildroot] [PATCH] infra: add the transient download mechanism

[Yann E. MORIN <yann.morin.1998@free.fr>]

Michael, All,

On 2020-01-16 11:15 +0100, Michael Nazzareno Trimarchi spake thusly:
> On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 11:03 AM Thomas Petazzoni
> <thomas.petazzoni@bootlin.com> wrote:
> > > We are using a similar setup of Nicolas. Right now we have
> > > CI and reproducible build using external tools. What I would like to solve
> > > with buildroot is:
> > >
> > > - make the build reproducible
> > > - implement topic build on custom patch using CI
> > > - make tagging and branching easy
> > Could you give more details, because these items are quite vague/fuzzy,
> > and I don't understand from a very practical point of view what you
> > mean. Could you describe some example workflow, what would be your
> > expectation of Buildroot's behavior, etc.

I have to admit that, like Thomas, I do not completely understand what
you're doing or trying to achieve...

> Suppose you have this manifest
[--SNIP--]
> This one describe the project and we have override part for the
> project in the manifest. For each version we can tag
> and each repo and create a snapshot manifest of the project.
> Manifest will have revison set to revision="refs/tags/<some tag>"
> 
> If I need to emit a release starting from some tag I can branch it and
> apply patch on top of this branch and everything
> can be stored as a separed manifest. Using jenkins trigger on topic
> upload on gerrit we can easily build a version with some
> patchset applied and if we want to re-build some version we can just
> use the right tagged manifest

I don't understand the problem that using repo solves.

repo's manifest identifies packages, where they are from, and what
version to use for each. That is exactly what the _VERSION and _SITE do
in a .mk file to begin with...

Using repo and a manifest only seem interesting when one wants to have
their packages in the same directory structure as Buildroot, and use
_SITE_METHOD = local. But in that case, a repo manifest is very akin to
git submodules.

And in that case, there is no need to be able to uses branches as
_VERSION, since the packages sources jsut 'follow' the branch buildroot
is on, and that repo checked out...

Regards,
Yann E. MORIN.

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