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

[Richard Purdie]

On Wed, 2020-01-08 at 13:10 +0100, Pascal Huerst wrote:
> 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...

I did look at and think a bit about your patch. The trouble for me (as
the bitbake maintainer) is that:

a) it isn't clear/obvious from the variable name what it does (or even 
   from the code)
b) it adds yet more options to the fetcher which increases the test 
   matrix and possible ways things can break
c) the test doesn't actually test it does what its supposed to (no 
   check is made on which output is downloaded for a given revision)

Some of these can be fixed, some are much harder and I can't decide if
supporting this kind of edge case is going to be an overall good thing
for the project or not. I don't want to give you false hope by fixing
c) only to say "no".

Add in Khem's valid concerns about reproducibility and it makes it a
tough one even to give feedback on.

If we have a ton of users saying "yes we really need this", that would
help but I haven't seen that as yet...

Cheers,

Richard