[oe] RFC: Support for R/W git in bitbake

[Paul Eggleton]

On Wednesday 18 April 2012 03:34:27 Ulf Samuelsson wrote:
> 1. If I am busy working on an application, then it simplifies the
> development process.
>      I can modify the code in the tree and push.
>      This is mainly for kernel development.
> 
> 2. If I work on a prerelease of some S/W drivers/Applications under NDA,
>      then I cannot make that code publicly available
>      but I still want to put  that on my Internet accessible git server.
>      Typicailly this is before the release of a new chip and info about
> the chip should not be
>      made public before the chip is released.
> 
> 3.  I want to be able to ship something similar to the Angstrom setup
> scripts
>       to someone else, and have them build an image, but it should not
> be available
>       to anyone not accepted (without public key at the git server).
> 
> There are other uses for such a functionality, but those are my
> immediate needs.
> 
> As you see, this is mostly for development.
> Once the code is released, then the recipe would be changed to the
> normal git access.
> 
> Didn't know anything about the externalsrc bbclass, but after checking,
> I would say no.
> It won't do the two things above. I do see the use of it though.

externalsrc should handle everything except automatically fetching the source; 
for that you need to have your own local git clone (which of course can be 
r/w). I guess it depends on whether you expect to be sending such recipes to 
non-developers; for developers it ought not to be too much of a hassle to have 
their own local git clone.

The only problem with having an r/w checkout you are doing development in 
under WORKDIR is that if you bitbake -c clean the recipe you will lose 
whatever you are working on - externalsrc avoids this.

Cheers,
Paul

-- 

Paul Eggleton
Intel Open Source Technology Centre