On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 2:24 PM, Christopher Covington <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

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;a=blob;f=default.xml;h=8ff267206ad36b5ded032aa15d313fa19af6e0a5;hb=refs/heads/master

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

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;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/release

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.

cheers

nicolas