On 1 June 2011 11:41, Christian Robottom Reis kiko@linaro.org wrote:
I seem to be hung up on having a way of saying "this hardware pack's kernel was built from this git tree with this config", so I wanted to explore the use cases a bit more:
- My #1 use case is, once I've installed a hardware pack, running into a problem and then being able to verify whether it contains a certain patch or was built with a certain config option. I'd like to know that because it's the first thing the KWG and LT people ask me when I go to report the bug.
This problem could be easily solved with git::
All official Linaro builds are generated from a single git tree that has branches for different kernel versions that we build from being automatically updated during the build process. The git rev is embedded in the kernel package name (linaro-linux-<githash>-...) and also in the kernel uname so that it is immediately obvious what tree and set of patches it come from and the KWG or LT can go fix the issue in their private trees that then get pulled into the main git tree. We can also tag the git tree during a build and embed that into the kernel uname.
Zach suggested SPDX (as in spdx.org) as a solution to this problem; I'm not sure I understand enough about it (Loïc's provided a sample file at http://spdx.org/wiki/sample-partial-spdx-file-geronimo) but here's my strawman proposal of what data we should give people quick access to:
Quick look at it and to me it seems a bit heavy for just having a way to find out what's in the kernel. If we want to carry other information than that than it would be good to have all the meta-data in one place such as the SPDX file.
- What kernel tree it was built from (A URL to the git tree) - What revision (A revision ID) - What patches were applied on top of it (A URL to the patchset, maybe?)
By patchset do you mean broken out patches as in a quilt stack or a changelog of the patches? If someone has the git url and git revision, they inherently know what patches are in the kernel.
- What kernel config was used to build it (A separate file in the hwpack directory?)
Do we have a repo where we store these? We probably want something similar to the kernel with an "official" repo used for build purposes that can be tagged at with the same tag as the kernel builds.
Thanks, ~Deepak