Hi Nicolas,
On 05/17/2013 09:20 AM, Nicolas Dechesne wrote:
On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 2:24 PM, Christopher Covington <cov@codeaurora.org mailto:cov@codeaurora.org> wrote:
>> I notice you've created a number of shell scripts to manage checking out >> multiple git repositories, specific revisions of git repositories for a >> release, etc. Repo [1] does this stuff pretty well that you might want to >> consider as an eventual alternative. > > I was considering repo few times but jenkins-setup scripts are used not > only to fetch/update/freeze git repositories but mostly to handle build > jobs (at CI or any other machine). I'm glad to hear that you've looked into it. There's certainly a lot more to automation than revision control, although Repo does seem to play well with others in my experience. Anyhow, I just figured if there was an unexplored possibility to make things easier for developers and users, I'd try to mention it.hi.
even before that discussion started i was using 'repo' to manage my own (currently private) OE based distro, and I thought I would share my own conclusions too.. so i am currently using repo with a OE 'manifest' that describe the set of all 'layers' (trees) which i need to build my distro. I am not using gerrit at all, I am just using repo as a tool to manager multiple 'git trees' in a somehow synchronous manner.
and as surprised as i was... i have to say that I like this setup very much. The main advantages i can see are:
- ability to checkout the entire 'distro' at once, as well as update all tree
at once: repo sync
- ability to easily track and switch 1 or more stable versions, as well as
master: repo init -b dylan && repo sync
- we could potentially use the 'smartsync' feature of repo to provide an
'always' working environment for our downstream users
- ability to create 'static' manifest with the commit of each sub project to
easily regenerate 'releases' (repo manifest -r)
and the *most* interesting feature by far to me, is 'repo grep' that is equivalent to 'git grep' but in all *projects*. For OE work 'git grep' is a very useful command, so ability to grep in all layers at once is a killer feature.
since a picture is worth a thousand words... and since I cannot show my current distro trees for, i have made a sample manifest for review.
https://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/ndec/oemanifest.git https://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/ndec/oemanifest.git;a=summary
This is a simple manifest that pulls oe-core, meta-oe, bitbake, meta-linaro and meta-beagleboard, see:
https://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/ndec/oemanifest.git%3Ba=blob%3Bf=defa...
the workflow is the following:
- for someone who needs to setup the build env:
repo init -u git://git.linaro.org/people/ndec/oemanifest.git http://git.linaro.org/people/ndec/oemanifest.git repo sync
- to switch from master to dylan:
repo init -b dylan && repo sync
- to grep the entire set of layers:
repo grep SRC_URI
- and 'release manifests' can be checked out in the tree as well, see:
https://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/ndec/oemanifest.git%3Ba=shortlog%3Bh=...
I like this use of pinned revisions on a branch, and I wonder if it might be useful to do this for last-known-good revisions too. Assuming a project is to the point where LKGR info is worth the hassle of implementing something, if automation could just run `repo manifest -r` and commit and push the output to an "lkgr" branch of the manifest.git repository, that might make the hassle a bit less than setting up an XML-RPC manifest-server to do the same job.
Initially i was hoping to get a similar setup with git submodule instead of repo, but submodule won't let us track a 'branch' to 'updating' all trees isn't as simple, and also i had some troubles because 'bitbake' is in oe-core/.gitignore, and that would prevent me from adding the bitbake submodule... anyways, i think 'repo'
feel free to respond if you have any feedback. but basically it looks like we might use a similar setup for one of our next projects here.
It looks to me like a good setup. I hope to hear more about it in the future.
Regards, Christopher