[OE-core] Looking for a way to build latest tagged releases in recipes

[Khem Raj]

On Wed, Jan 8, 2020 at 4:10 AM Pascal Huerst <pascal.huerst at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey everyone!
>
> I'm looking for a way in yocto to build tagged releases or actually to
> build the newest tagged release from repositories.
>
> There is a way to specify a branch or a tag in a recipe, but no way to
> always clone the newest tagged release, that I'm aware of. I submitted a
> patch to bitbake's mailing list with a proposal [1], that would use
> bitbake's `latest_versionstring()`, to always find, fetch and build the
> latest tagged release. Unfortunately there wasn't much of a reaction on
> that proposal, so I'm taking a step back, collecting ideas on how this
> could be achieved properly.
>
> Please share your ideas...
>

while I understand the usecase, it has a downside, where a build can fail due to
someone pushing a new tag. I think we allow AUTOREV on branches which
is helpful in development and
CI systems. but deducing newest tag is useful when making releases,
this also means that it will bump the rev
in recipe automatically and people might get enticed to use it in
release process.

For such usecases, Maybe you can use floating tags ( like
'latest-release' or 'last-good' ) and move them when needed and lock
the recipes to use them to achieve what you want.

since use of AUTOREV in public recipes is discouraged, this does not
affect public layers as much
but I do worry about alternate workflows.

> Thanks!
> Pascal
>
> [1]
> http://lists.openembedded.org/pipermail/bitbake-devel/2019-December/020618.html
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