[OE-core] [RFC] policy proposal: INC_PR

[Richard Purdie]

On Tue, 2011-09-20 at 22:36 +0200, Koen Kooi wrote:
> Op 20 sep 2011, om 22:30 heeft Richard Purdie het volgende geschreven:
> 
> > On Tue, 2011-09-20 at 14:10 -0500, Mark Hatle wrote:
> >> On 9/20/11 2:04 PM, Dmitry Eremin-Solenikov wrote:
> >>> Hello, colleagues,
> >>>
> >>> While debugging some stuff in oe-core & company I've noticed that
> >>> lot's of packages
> >>> either don't use INC_PR, or misuse it (e.g. .inc has INC_PR, but  
> >>> then
> >>> .bb just defines PR = "rX").
> >>
> >> I've noticed similar things.  I'd agree, we should define and use  
> >> INC_PR for
> >> items that have .inc files.  There have been many times that I need  
> >> to fix a bug
> >> in the .inc file and end up manually updating the PR is 2 or 3  
> >> recipes that use
> >> the .inc.
> >>
> >> One question though, how do we handle packages with multilib .inc  
> >> files?
> >>
> >> INC_PR += ...  (or is it .=)
> >
> > I'm going to disagree here. I'd actually like to see the whole PR  
> > thing
> > become irrelevant. Its insane we have to spend so much time doing
> > something the system should be able to figure out for itself. It
> > currently serves two purposes:
> >
> > 1. Triggers rebuilds of packages when they change
> > 2. Handles package feed upgrades correctly
> >
> > For 1, we can use the sstate checksums and for 2, we can use some kind
> > of PR server, either local or networked.
> >
> > I'm therefore proposing that after the current release is finished, we
> > enable the BasicHash signature generator (which adds the sstate
> > checksums to the stamp files) and stop bumping PR values (so INC_PR  
> > can
> > die and PR values can likely fade out of recipes). If the tooling we
> > have for 2 isn't enough we'll then just simply have to improve it and
> > make it work.
> >
> > Comments?
> 
> Judging from the previous big changes in OE-core, can we have the  
> tooling actually work before abolishing PR?
> AFAICT the PR 'syncing' across all builders for a distro hasn't been  
> solved properly yet. With the current tooling it is impossible for  
> people to rebuild a tag and get the same PRs as the master build had  
> at the time of the tag.

This is the first time that problem has been specifically rasied to my
knowledge so yes, we need to have a solution for that I agree.

Likely, the best way to handle it is going to be to dump the PR server's
database into an include file which sets the PR values as needed and
then the include file can be included in the tagged release.

This would mean that anyone building the checkout would then have the
correct set of base PR values to be consistent with the main package
repo as released.

Alternatives would be including the PR database itself somehow but it
probably makes sense to start a separate discussion about this.

Are there any other problems that need to get fixed? I still think we
are going to need to switch sooner than later so we can start to find
and address issues as if we continue to wait, few people actually test
and figure them out sadly :(

Cheers,

Richard