[Buildroot] Forcing fresh clone/checkout of custom linux/uboot SVN urls

[Buildroot] Forcing fresh clone/checkout of custom linux/uboot SVN urls

[Jesse Van Gavere]

Hello,

I wanted to gauge for interest (or if I could be given the opportunity
to) for adding an option to buildroot that would instead of making a
tarball of a custom version, force a new checkout to be done rather
than an extraction of an existing tarball. (along with the option of
making it a checkout rather than an export as it does initially)
My use case for this is the following:
We have our own linux/uboot (svn) repositories, however we currently
have to modify the linux/uboot makefiles because trunk development for
us is not possible if we point to the trunk url of our linux/uboot
repository and then use "HEAD" as the custom repo_version. It will do
an export once, put it in the download folder and extract that later
on.
We would have to remove the tarball in the download folder for every
change in our trunk repos and because it's an export we also can't
develop on it.
My idea was to add 2 new config options that are enabled if
KERNEL_CUSTOM_SVN or UBOOT_COSTOM_SVN is selected, one that would
override the extract command so it won't look at the download folder,
and another one that would make it perform a checkout instead of an
extract.
Is this something I could add to the main buildroot or do I best just
keep this inside our own buildroot repo?

Regards,
Jesse
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Re: [Buildroot] Forcing fresh clone/checkout of custom linux/uboot SVN urls

[Yann E. MORIN]

Jesse, All,

On 2022-09-20 16:43 +0200, Jesse Van Gavere spake thusly:
> I wanted to gauge for interest (or if I could be given the opportunity
> to) for adding an option to buildroot that would instead of making a
> tarball of a custom version, force a new checkout to be done rather
> than an extraction of an existing tarball. (along with the option of
> making it a checkout rather than an export as it does initially)
> My use case for this is the following:
> We have our own linux/uboot (svn) repositories, however we currently
> have to modify the linux/uboot makefiles because trunk development for
> us is not possible if we point to the trunk url of our linux/uboot
> repository and then use "HEAD" as the custom repo_version. It will do
> an export once, put it in the download folder and extract that later
> on.

Please, look at my proposal about the notion of "transient downloads":

    https://lore.kernel.org/buildroot/20200930173030.2461586-1-yann.morin.1998@free.fr/

IIRC, the conclusion was that the implemetation was OK (maybe barring a
few minor details, I can't remember exactly), but there was no consensus
on the wording to describe that feature in the manual and in the commit
log.

Since I did not agree on changing the wording, and since noone picked it
up to rewrite it, it was not applied.

I ultimately believe this transient stuff was a mis-feature and a bad
idea to begin with, and would be better served by people providing the
appropriate FOO_OVERIDE_SRCDIR in their local.mk, and/or have their CI
setups actually do the checkouts of the appropriate components and
set corresponding FOO_OVERRIDE_SRCDIR before spawning the build.

I don't think adding new features for which we already have a technical
superior solution, is a good addition to Buildroot.

Finally, using a branch name in FOO_VERSION is also a very bad idea, as
this makes the build non-reproducible, and non-predictable. See the
manual for more explanations, section 18.6.2. generic-package reference
about LIBFOO_VERSION:
    https://buildroot.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#generic-package-reference

Regards,
Yann E. MORIN.

> We would have to remove the tarball in the download folder for every
> change in our trunk repos and because it's an export we also can't
> develop on it.
> My idea was to add 2 new config options that are enabled if
> KERNEL_CUSTOM_SVN or UBOOT_COSTOM_SVN is selected, one that would
> override the extract command so it won't look at the download folder,
> and another one that would make it perform a checkout instead of an
> extract.
> Is this something I could add to the main buildroot or do I best just
> keep this inside our own buildroot repo?
> 
> Regards,
> Jesse
> _______________________________________________
> buildroot mailing list
> buildroot@buildroot.org
> https://lists.buildroot.org/mailman/listinfo/buildroot

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