[bitbake-devel] Patch idea - fetcher for gerrit patches

[Khem Raj]

On Mon, 2019-11-11 at 07:58 +0000, Mikko.Rapeli at bmw.de wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Interesting idea.
> 
> We use gerrit but don't neeed to expose gerrit details to bitbake
> fetcher.
> 
> Instead, we use gerrit changes to fetch meta layer changes using a
> separate checkout
> script. It handles gerrit topics, e.g. same topic name is used to
> bundle changes
> from multiple meta layer git trees. This enables large transitions
> and updates as single
> topic.

There is a similar setup we have for CI using gerrit, but once you
start playing with fetchers, bitbake is not happy and the build
consistency is jeopardized as well, e.g. new QA checks etc, come in way
in other words you have to maintain this additional CI fetch method and
it grows cruft. So I would think if we were to do some additional work
in fetchers to achieve this, that would be long term sustainable, and
perhaps useful for other gerrit users or other SCMs

> 
> In our case it's a grave bug to use SRC_URIs in bitbake recipes
> without referring
> to proper branch and commit id. There have been cases where a commit-
> id from an open
> gerrit review got integrated which is bad, bad. I can only imagine
> that testing
> could be easier if bitbake recipes were to support gerrit directly,
> e.g. to trigger
> a bitbake test build for an open gerrit review change. But there are
> other ways
> to script that without exposing gerrit details to bitbake.
> 
> So I'm not sure if this gerrit fetcher is easier. At least I would
> like to disable it,
> or add a custom QA check which forbids its use in release build
> recipes.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -Mikko